2020 Annual Report

Juliana Mário had big plans. The 35-year-old mother ran a small grocery shop in a suburb of Maputo, Mozambique, which was doing so well that she hoped to open a second business in the same location.

But when the COVID-19 crisis hit, her plans for the future changed overnight. Now her business — and her family — were in survival mode.

“At the start of the pandemic, I lost many customers, and sales and profits went down,” she recalls. “I feared to get contaminated by the virus while buying goods and serving customers, and I even thought of closing the shop to protect myself and my family.”

But Juliana was part of a TechnoServe program that helped women entrepreneurs maximize their business skills and opportunities: Business Women Connect, a partnership with the ExxonMobil Foundation.

The TechnoServe team conducted a rapid diagnostic survey of the program’s entrepreneurs in April 2020 to understand their status and changing needs. Quickly shifting to digital outreach, the team helped the businesswomen make adaptations that would enable their enterprises to survive.

Juliana learned financial and marketing skills that helped her optimize operations even during a market downturn. She also learned to “think outside the box,” she says, in identifying new income opportunities.

She began baking and selling cakes, which proved popular with customers and profitable for her. Sales at her grocery have doubled since the start of the pandemic. And she is working to expand her business with a line of wholesale products and a sit-down area where customers can enjoy their cake and juice.

“I am very excited about the coming year,” Juliana says. “I have always wanted to be a woman entrepreneur, and I consider myself a strong woman with many business ideas.”

Once again, Juliana has big plans.

Learn more about Juliana’s story.

Juliana was among many entrepreneurs in TechnoServe programs who did not expect their businesses to survive when the pandemic first hit. But with remote training and crisis support, most small enterprises were able to remain open. Below are the survival rates for businesses in Anglo American-TechnoServe collaborations surveyed in November 2020.

% of entrepreneurs who reported their businesses were open; based on survey sample of 123 enterprises

When Eloy Castañón was a boy, he would wake before the sunrise and follow his father to the melon fields on their small plot of land in Matamoros, in Mexico’s Coahuila state. 

For Eloy, now 41 years old, mornings meant lessons about growing fruit. Over the years, Eloy has continued his family’s tradition of melon farming. But it has become more difficult to earn a decent living. 

Regularly selling his produce to intermediaries for low prices, and high interest rates, kept Eloy and his fellow farmers in debt. “We were at the service of the coyotes [middlemen],” he says, “We worked for them.” 

In 2016, Eloy joined the Inclusive Agriculture Program, a collaboration between TechnoServe and Walmart Foundation Mexico. He learned how to improve the productivity and quality of his produce while also developing his business skills. 

With this stable foundation, Eloy was able to adapt his business after COVID-19 hit. Consumer purchasing habits had shifted to larger grocers for fear of shopping at crowded markets, and with most of the hotel and restaurant sector shut down, food was either sold at low prices or made to waste. 

The TechnoServe team helped smallholder farmers like Eloy enter more formal markets by conducting over 11,000 remote training calls and sharing 4,000 videos to help farmers improve their crops, establish new relationships with five buyers, and maintain critical income during a time of uncertainty and upheaval. 

As a result, says Eloy, “We were able to maintain our sales and market our product without a problem.” This is important to Eloy, because — just as when he was younger — his farming is connected to his family. 

“I am married and have three children,” he explains. “My income is to support them.” 

Read more about Eloy and other stories of fighting COVID-19’s impact around the world.

The COVID-19 crisis disrupted markets for many smallholder farmers like Eloy. The survey data below — from hundreds of farmers in TechnoServe agriculture programs across 11 countries — indicates that farmers growing crops in supply chains supported by TechnoServe had an easier time selling those crops.

% among farmers who reported difficulty selling their crops, November 2020

For Herbert Katangole, the Uganda Coffee Farm College program was not just a source of agronomy training. It was a source of satisfaction and purpose.

A retired teacher, Herbert had joined the program — a partnership between JDE Peet’s, Keurig Dr Pepper, Enveritas, and TechnoServe — to learn how to better manage his coffee farm and support his two grandchildren. But ever the teacher, Herbert also enthusiastically shared the techniques he learned with his neighbors and members of his focal farmer group.

In March 2020, all of that changed. Amid social distancing restrictions, the group trainings that Herbert loved so dearly were cancelled. He wondered how he would receive the information he needed.

Fellow coffee farmer Robert Mihanda, who supported four children on his coffee income, had similar fears. “The lockdown was a time when everyone was on their own, and everything was so different,” he recalls.

Even amid the pandemic, prices for coffee were stable, and the crop represented an economic lifeline for families — if they continued to receive the information they needed to effectively grow and harvest it.

The TechnoServe team responded by sending text messages to the farmers, sharing not only agronomy advice but emotional support. These messages, says Robert, “continued to remind us of what to do to make the coffee happy so that it makes us happy.” He called the advice they contained bwiino, using the Luganda word for “treasured information.”

Once restrictions eased, TechnoServe trainers were able to resume visiting farmers individually. “My farmer trainer Moses came to see us and check on how the farm was doing, and it felt good to be personally visited,” said Herbert. 

Among participants who completed this training, 82% said their coffee harvests grew larger as a result.

Herbert is one of them. With his enthusiasm, hard work — and some creative solutions by his TechnoServe trainers — his coffee harvest grew by 50% between 2019 and 2020. 

Learn more about Herbert’s story.

TechnoServe worked with the research firm Laterite to survey the impact of the pandemic on farmers like Herbert in its East African coffee programs. One of the study’s findings was that growing coffee was a more reliable way for these farmers to earn income than other methods that were more affected by the pandemic.

% of total farmers who reported lost income in each category; of 1,290 coffee farmers in TechnoServe programs who reported losing income as a result of COVID-19 (June/July 2020)

Juliana Solís Barón grew up on a farm nestled in the lush mountains of northern Peru’s San Martín region. Her grandparents were both coffee farmers, and Juliana has many fond memories of playing amid the coffee trees. But farmers in this area often struggle to earn a good living from their coffee, and Juliana dreamed of one day starting her own company to give back to her community. 

That dream came true in 2017 when she opened Makisapa, a coffee shop in San Martín. But the beginning was not without challenges. “When starting the business, the biggest challenge was the investment,” Juliana explained. “We had very low capital — almost zero.” 

In February 2020, Juliana joined the Coffee Alliance for Excellence (CAFE) program, a public-private partnership with TechnoServe, the U.S. Agency for International Development, global coffee roaster JDE, and coffee exporter Perhusa. The program helps create a self-sustaining cycle of progress by strengthening the larger market system, from farmer business groups to coffee shops like Juliana’s.

In March 2020, as cases of COVID-19 increased, the Peruvian government implemented one of the world’s most stringent and longest-lasting lockdowns. Along with entrepreneurs throughout the country, Juliana had to re-think her entire business. 

With continuous support from TechnoServe trainers, Juliana and her team learned how to incorporate essential health protocols into their daily operations. They started making coffee deliveries by bicycle to promote home consumption and transformed the coffee shop into a market, with a wide variety of local products for purchase.

“We had to react quickly and make changes,” Juliana said. “CAFE helped us promote ourselves [in a catalog] with photographs of the market and with our participation in a webinar with specialists.”

Thanks to these innovations, Juliana’s sales have increased by 70% since the beginning of the pandemic. “It is a dream come true,” she says.

Learn more about Juliana’s story.

After a severe economic shock in the first few months of the pandemic, most of the entrepreneurs working with TechnoServe, like Juliana, adapted their businesses and improved their sales. The graph below shows the percentage of entrepreneurs who reported sales decreases in the past month, a number that dropped significantly over time.

% of respondents in 13 countries who reported that their business’s sales had declined over the past month

In a year in which parts of Nigeria were declared at risk of famine, there came a rare bright spot: the amount of fortified food in the country had skyrocketed.

Nigeria has the largest number of malnourished people in Africa and the world’s second-highest number of malnourished children. Fortifying common foods with nutrients is one of the most effective ways to fight malnutrition at scale.

Now came news that the amount of fortified wheat flour in Nigeria had increased by 68%, and the amount of fortified sugar had increased over 200%. This expanded access to these fortified staple foods to the equivalent 73.5 million and 125.7 people million, respectively.

What was behind these numbers?

In 2018, TechnoServe began a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to work with food processors in Nigeria and elsewhere to help them improve the fortification of their consumer products. Applying private sector expertise, the team promoted the business case for fortification with Nigerian processors; helped them overcome technical hurdles; and designed a regulatory framework and fortification tracking system.

The team also helped convene an annual forum of public and private sector leaders in food processing and nutrition. The latest forum, held online in December 2020, highlighted the most recent progress. In addition to gains in sugar and wheat flour fortification, an additional 173.5 metric tons of fortified edible oil was now reaching the population, and nearly all salt remained adequately fortified.

Bill Gates, who co-convened the event with TechnoServe and Dangote Foundation President Alhaji Aliko Dangote, noted the importance of fortification efforts even in a year consumed by a global pandemic.

“The impact of getting these essential micronutrients into the staple foods through fortification is one of the best investments in human development that I’ve ever seen,” he remarked at the event. “It’s right up there with vaccination and other public health initiatives.”

Learn more about fighting malnutrition in Nigeria.