Restoring Hope and Dignity to Rural Farmers Through Restablishing Rural Agro Markets

The decade long recession experienced in Zimbabwe since the start of the unplanned land reform programme led to economic decline that decimated the manufacturing sector. This resulted in the disappearance of inputs in the shops, especially in remote rural areas.

Since 2007, development partners in Zimbabwe agreed that access to affordable inputs was crucial to the revival of agriculture in Zimbabwe, ravaged by years of economic decline. A farmer with adequate inputs achieves a minimum 1.3 ton/ha while those without inputs harvest anything from 0 to 700 kg/ha. In 2009, donors mobilised $70 million to supply farmers with inputs. This was inadequate and surely unsustainable annually. SNV and its partners, responded by developing the Rural Agro-dealer Restocking Programme (RARP), piloted in 2009/10 to test the appropriateness of market-driven input distribution methods in the emerging economic environment. In the 2010/11 season, the programme was upscaled to cover the whole country with support from DANIDA, FAO and a German NGO called HELP.

The RARP approach is based on facilitating the re-establishment of sustainable input market channels between farmers, agro dealers, wholesalers and manufacturers. To start RARP, SNV facilitated dialogue with wholesalers and manufacturers in identifying the challenges and opportunities perceived if they were to supply rural agro-dealers with consignment stock. Various risks were identified notably fire, fidelity, loss of money, transit loss and product recall. Corresponding risk mitigation strategies were developed with various wholesalers and insurers. SNV consolidated the views and developed generic concepts for both insurance and wholesaling.