Overview

Farm Concern International, FCI believes that combination of innovative technologies and inclusive business models is key in unlocking opportunities for smallholder commercialization and competitive participation in profitable markets. FCI through this approach embedded under the Commercial Villages Model seeks to foster participatory identification of demand driven innovations and technologies that increase farmers’ access to inputs, increases yield, enhances collective marketing action among smallholders as well as linkages to business services providers. FCI’s innovations include; ICT Platforms for market access and capacity development, climate smart technologies like ‘kijiji’ drip Irrigation kits, Village processing equipment and processing technologies, post-harvest management among others. FCI’s ICT applications in Agricultural commercialization and market development include; AfmaX which is mobile telephony platform based on USSD technology that connects farmers to markets and other essential business service providers. This application runs on normal feature phones in Kenya and has so far enabled trade among smallholder farmers amounting to USD 886,365,625.00 FCI also champions utilization of web and mobile enabled applications for farmers’ capacity development. A case in point is www.ehinga.org a digital platform for comprehensive access to Agricultural information developed and deployed to in partnership with World Vision Rwanda. FCI has also embarked on a Commercial Villages digitization process under eKijiji (eCommercial Villages) initiative a development that will oversee all services and solutions provided under the commercial villages infrastructure digitized for scale up. Other Innovations include; virtual real time data collection tools, near-the- farm (village) processing equipment designed by FCI and fabricated by selected partners across Africa.