Smart Intervention to Improve Production, Productivity

Feed the Future Ethiopia Farm Service Center project is a three year initiative model developed by Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA) to serve the inventory and technical needs of smallholder and medium sized farmers. The Farmer Service Center (FSC) model has been tested with high levels of success and community buy-in and currently developed as a working model in several countries across Africa and Eastern Europe.

The FSC model in Ethiopia also demonstrates and adopts innovative techniques in agronomy and livestock improvements. FSC provides advisory and in house consultation services to improve smallholder farmers’ productivity and income. Read more

The vice president for Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA) has underscored the role women play in agriculture in most developing countries.

As such, Ms. Sheryl Cowan has urged the Liberian government to empower women so they too can contribute to the enhancement of the country’s food security.

Ms. Cowan made the statement yesterday when she served as guest speaker at a program marking the 2016 Medium Small Micro Enterprise (MSME) conference in Monrovia. Read more

This post was written by Russ Webster, Vice President for Program Development at Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA). For further discussion on the enabling environment for agriculture, register to attend Tuesday’s Agrilinks webinar: How Can Enabling Environment Reform Facilitate Agricultural Sector Growth?

Hunger is not an abstraction. A lack of sufficient food, if left unaddressed, can bring about social unrest and mass migrations, incite wars, and destroy nations. Read more

GANTA, Nimba County — Cultivating New frontiers in Agriculture and the Liberia Agro-business development Activity has officially opened its field office in Ganta, Nimba County with the launching of a Digital Financial Services.

Speaking at the ceremony on Wednesday September 21, 2016 at a local Hotel in the commercial city of Ganta, Liberia Agro- business development activity Chief of Party Daniel Gies said with the support of the United States Agency for International Development and the Ministry of Agriculture, LADA hopes to build an infrastructure that will support increase sales and markets for Thousands of Liberian farmers who can work and produce but lack market access for their produce. Read more

By Sylvain Roy, President and CEO of CNFA, featured on The Hill:

Having spent most of my professional life in international development in countries across the globe, I’m frequently asked – why should the United States invest in supporting global development while we are facing many urgent needs domestically? How do we justify spending money abroad to address the world’s food security needs when so many pressing issues need to be addressed within our own country?

The answer is simple. Read more

By Sylvain Roy, CEO and President of CNFA, featured on the Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Today millions of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa face a range of ongoing threats to their nutritional and economic security. West African farmers for instance—whose livelihood typically depends on staple crops such as maize, millet, or sorghum often produced on about five acres of marginal land—operate on a small scale and have limited access to markets.

With their socio-economic power already restricted by low literacy, lack of transportation options, and limited access to credit, these farmers also face low productivity because of soil degradation, difficulty in accessing high-quality inputs, and lack of mechanization. Read more

It is impossible to ignore that Zimbabwe is facing a crisis.

We drive west from Bulawayo on a paved road that, over the course of a few hours, becomes cracked and pockmarked before dissolving entirely into a dirt track.

Eventually the dirt track disappears and we are driving on a dusty path, the branches of mopane trees scraping our windows as we go. We pass field after field of dead and stunted maize, millet and sorghum. Read more

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) hosted a dinner in Islamabad to showcase Pakistan as a regional and global hub for quality halal meat and vegetables. The event, attended by participants in the fifth-annual International Halal Conference and Exhibition, highlighted recent industry achievements following the adoption of Pakistan’s Halal Authority Act of 2015. Read more

On January 29th USAID’s Restoring Efficiency in Agricultural Production (REAP) announced a winner in the Mariam Kutelia Research Grant Competition. Mariam Zaldastanishvili, a graduate from the University of St. Andrew, Scotland, claimed the prize.

Zaldastanishvili began working with REAP in October 2015 assisting the organization’s Grants Procurement Specialist. Her research was dedicated to ‘an empirical study of the relationship between the availability of agriculture-related information and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) among rural farmers in Georgia.’ Read more