Farmers not only work the land, they also invest time and money into marketing their crops. The quality of their produce is important if they wish to maintain a good relationship with their buyers. A significant part of the Agri-ProFocus network activities therefore focus on market access. These activities aim to organise and strengthen farmers in their role as economic actors.

We work on:

• Value chain development through multi-stakeholder platforms.
• Ensuring accessible and up-to-date market (pricing) information.
• Designing co-operative approaches to marketing for smallholders.
• Upgrading the marketing skills of smallholders through entrepreneurship training.

In the past few years, the Agri-ProFocus network has organised meetings, research and other hands-on trajectories that deal with on the challenges of market access and value chain development. These are some of our results:

• Several expert meetings were held in the Netherlands to discuss good practices. This was done in cooperation with Wageningen University (WUR), the Institute of Social Studies (ISS, The Hague) and the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT, Amsterdam).
• In different countries learning trajectories for farmer organisations were started, including for:
  1. Organic cotton farmers in Mali (together with SNV, KIT and ICCO).
  2. Oilseed farmers in Uganda (together with WUR, Agriterra and SNV).
  3. The Agriterra-SNV partnership on strengthening producer organisations in East and West Africa and in South Asia.
  4. The Ethiopia Learning Alliance (together with ICCO, KIT, Cordaid and Agriterra).
• The WUR/DGIS Pro-Poor Value Chain Action Research project was started, which involved pilot studies in Rwanda (cassave), Niger (onions), Ethiopia (sesame), Kenya, Burkina Faso and Mozambique.

In the coming years, the Agri-ProFocus network aims to take an active role in linking and connecting research initiatives and relevant knowledge about how to improve market access to the Agri-Hubs in various countries. We hope that this will help to make research and innovation more demand driven as well as encourage collaboration between Agri-ProFocus members and local knowledge institutes.