RockFeller Foundation’s YieldWise Inniative provide market access to over 10,000 agripreneurs, farmers

YieldWise, an intiative of the RockFeller Foundation, which targets African agripreneurs and farmers towards helping them reduce post harvest losses, said it has recorded some significant milestones in about a year since it started working in Nigeria.

Some of the achievements include equipping more than 20,000 tomatoes farmers and agripreneurs in Kano State with skills in post-harvest loss management in the tomato value chain, and linking them to the Dangote Processing Factory where they can sell their harvest for processing into tomato paste.

Launched by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2016 the $130 million initiative aims at reducing food loss and waste by half by 2030, with a strategy to “fix broken links in the chain from farms to markets in African communities and help farmers [have] access [to] technologies and solutions to curb preventable crop loss.”

In an e-mailed statement from the press team of the initiative, aggregated farmers within YieldWise have been connected to The Dangote Processing Factory that has been able to process the first batch of tomatoes since opening plant since years ago and 10,000 farmers have been aggregated and connected to more than 15 alternative market channels.

The foundation has also been able to link farmers and agripreneurs to financing support with the registration of over 4,000 farmers with bank verification numbers to pre-qualify for the primary requirement to access loans from the CBN’s Anchor Borrower Scheme facilitated by the Bank of Agriculture (BOA).