Category: Program

Farmers need to be supported because they play a critical role in achieving zero hunger, Goal 2 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond the important task of food production, farmers are faced with a myriad of challenges such as climate change, outdated farming practices, high transport cost of farm harvests, post-harvest losses among others. These challenges impact on farmers’ incomes, food and nutrition and their psychosocial wellbeing.

FeedUp Africa aims to ameliorate the plight of these farmers by introducing them to sustainable practices and traditional approaches to livestock production, crop production, reducing post-harvest losses and wastes, enhancing their nutritional health through mixed farming with emphasis on poultry for protein intake. The modules also include marketing, customer service, book-keeping and documentation.

The facilitators were agribusiness experts and consultants, namely Songwa Diyabanza, Armel Dossa, Guy Kudjogbe, Lydie Fagbohun, and Carlos Dossa.

In his remark, Jinmi Ajayi, the Founder of FeedUp Africa stressed his expectations from participants, according to him, “participants were selected across various value chains and they are expected to share their knowledge within their communities.”

In May, 2022, we held our first FeedUp Africa seminar in Ibadan, Nigeria, the first in its series across Africa.

In Nigeria, and largely, Africa, the indices of these two parameters have been poor for ages despite multi-pronged efforts from different sectors.

The problem? Well, figures show that, in addition to political instability, climate change, and/or natural disasters, one of the other reasons food insecurity subsists is because active stakeholders (farmers and similar players) in the sector seldom have the right and fitting information for best practices.

As a platform founded to contribute through knowledge, programs and projects that will frontally improve food security and development indices in Africa, the FeedUp Africa seminar engaged 74 practitioners in this first installment, with 6 facilitators handling themes that cut across improving production techniques, handling post-harvest loss, and tackling insecurity.

The founder, Jinmi Ajayi, restated a need to deploy knowledge and targeted projects as an empowerment tool against food and nutrition security indices to open the seminar.

In his words, the organization was created to regularly communicate with stakeholders in the food system, describing the seminar’s primary purpose as fulfilling a need to provide stakeholders with information about best practices, a move he believes will help to reduce food insecurity.

“Actually, we do not need more new farmers, what we actually need is to enhance the capacity of the existing ones to maximize their potential output. And by capacity, I mean, both infrastructural and mental capacities of these practitioners”, he enthused

FeedUp AFRICA aims at intervening largely on the mental part. That is, to identify with gaps that knowledge can fill amongst practitioners and use that as a form of empowerment for them to become better and more productive stakeholders in the chain of efforts against food and nutrition insecurity.

“Using the ripple effect theory, we will not only teach these participants, but we will establish a structure of feedback, monitoring and continous guidance that will turn them to teachers of fellow practitioners on their different localities and clusters”, Mr. Ajayi added.

Our speakers on the day included Dr. Helen Emore, a portfolio worker with multiple expertise, an MSME Advisor, Business Consultant for Founders and Growing Businesses in Africa; Farmer Samson Ogbole, the Team lead for Eupepsia Place Limited (Soilless Farm Lab), – an agritech company; Dr. Eric Alao, who has been working in the Agribusiness Sphere since 1997 across various agricultural value chain; and Mr. Onyekachi Adekoya, a Security & Risk Management Professional.