Agriculture Commercialization (AGCOM) Project

The Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security in collaboration with Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) is implementing a six-year (2018-2023) Agriculture Commercialisation (AGCOM) Project with World Bank-IDA credit financing amounting to US$95 Million (SDR70.1 Million (WB/IDA Credit/Loan).

The project development objective (PDO) is to increase commercialization of agriculture value chain products with strong prospective market/commercial (value chain – buyer) linkages. The project has four components:

  1. Component 1: Building Productive Alliances is supporting integration of small-scale, emerging farmers (defined as farmers cultivating not more than 8 ha) into value chains by improving their capacity to finance and execute productivity-enhancing investments and respond to the requirements of end-markets and buyers (off-takers).
  2. Component 2: Support Investment Enabling Services is helping to organize Producer Organizations (POs), develop Productive Alliances (PAs), and advance access to markets (especially for mature PAs). In addition, this component is supporting improvements and trade environment that both deepen and sustain market linkages and improve financing for PAs and Pos
  3. Component 3: Contingency Emergency Response Component (CERC) establishes a disaster recovery contingency fund that may be activated in the event of an eligible natural or human-induced crisis or emergency and for which government has declared state of disaster.
  4. Component 4: Project Coordination and Management finances and coordinates project implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

Cross-Cutting Issues: The project mainstreams the crosscutting issues of gender, nutrition, and Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) and resilience throughout its components. These aspects are supposed to be managed under the broader scope of Environmental and Social Safeguards for the project.

The Department of Agriculture Extension Services (DAES) plays a very important role in the implementation of the project. The Department is one of the leaders of component one and assist in the following:

  • Facilitate recruitment of PIU Specialists for component 1 such as Institutional Development Specialist (IDS), Agribusiness Specialist (ABS); and Social Safeguards Specialist (SSS)
  • Major thrust is to support Building/Establishing Productive Alliance through organization and capacity building of POs and Pas, matching grant investment in Pos, partial credit guarantee fund and last mile public good infrastructure
  • Creating awareness of the project activities through radio, TV and awareness meetings (Communication Campaigns)
  • Develop IEC materials to support dissemination and up scaling of selected value chains
  • Facilitate recruitment of a broker on capacity building and coordinate all capacity building initiatives for POs
  • Building capacity of PAs and promotion of Good Agricultural Practices among POs in the Pas
  • Conducting field days to upscale adoption of the good technologies along the value chains
  • Provide support to social safe-guards and Cross Cutting Issues