The food situation in Africa and the associated opportunities.

The context in Africa is recipient to so much funding, with limited proof of impact. Suspect is that these funds are being directed towards project priorities that are not responsive and relevant to the problems of Africa ( a concept that needs falsification).

A quick scan on the marketplace for innovative ideas across Africa report volumes. The opportunities presented in these contexts and the promise of transformation is real. You only need to step foot in Lagos and have a feel of what disruptions can do to an economy.

Whatever is happening in Nigeria is a proxy to the increasing appetite for innovation and innovation driven social and development actions. This is expected to spread from the fintech landscape( the most dominant market in Africa with most going into payment management modules like Flutterwave) into food chains. When it does, much focus will be on efficiency in collection and distribution of food items.

Our immediate desire is to see proprietors and funders invest heavily in efforts to contribute towards knowledge management and learning; targeted at increasing productivity at source. We hope to support these course by generating rigorous evidence on the impact of such investments.

We particularly applaud Twiga foods ( Twiga Foods - Revolutionizing African Retail) on the initiatives and projects implemented so far; that are facilitating fresh produce handling and optimizing value to all players while on route to market. Further, we invite them to enhance internal systems on monitoring and evaluation-generating the necessary data/evidence for impact testing and reporting ( we are open to discuss shared objectives and potential partnerships).

We affirm that there is room for growth at Twiga and all other functions that are focused on innovations along the food chain in Africa. These prospects however, are dependent on their strategy on partnering with or seeking support from technical experts in gathering rigorous data and evidence through the available process and outcome evaluation methodologies. We also trust that if particular focus is given to the marginalized population strata in women, the youth and people living with disability; the medium-term targets on contribution towards transforming Africa will be achieved.

At PEA consultancy, innovative actions, especially those that are within Agriculture and food sustainability are priority. We have a consortium of specialized experts who are actively taking in collaborations focused on research with the ultimate objective of generating information that is critical to testing concepts/hypotheses on managing for sustainable growth.

Our engagements are motivated by the deficiencies that are characteristic of every value chain in Africa and the efforts that are currently taping into the abundance of resources that are yet to be exploited.

The fishing industry is one untapped resource that has the potential of bolstering the efforts on fight against hunger while anchoring the development agenda for African economies. We learn from reports by the African Development bank (2013) that estimated USD 4.5 billion in revenues and direct livelihood support to over 10 million Africans.

Macro- analysis informs us of the growth and development prospects which is dependent on the optimal use of the estimated 26,000 km coastline that is shared by African Countries to exert a multiplier effect on the referenced statistics. Of great impacts in this analysis is the fact that Africans are limited to micro production which in turn feeds up to 90% of its population.

We would wish to hypothesis on the scale of impact that a small disruptions in the fish chain would have on the livelihoods of the micro producers and the localized consumption pool. By definition, the referenced producers may not be in a position to fully explore the fish resources that are available to them in the immediate future ( given the 26,ooo km coastline) because of limitations in the associated factors of productions( labor, capital nd technology). These communities are extremely vulnerable. Any sudden disruptions will most probably rain havoc on their socio-economic safety nets.

Efforts to enhance fish productivity that is actively attracting massive investments and innovations, focused on small holder production is therefore timely and a good incentive ( stepping stone) towards building resilience across communities in Africa and setting the foundations for sustained transformation. We encourage design and builders of fish farming solutions to adopt user-experience models when researching on needs of the target communities.

At PEA, we are in the process of developing an evidence-driven project ( pilot) that will pool funds and deploy a quasi-experimental model to measure and report on the impact of adopting innovation driven fish farms (artificial fish ponds) with a comparison drawn from the earthen ( natural) fish ponds.

All collaborations are encouraged and accepted.