In the "Ask a TechnoServe Expert" series, our staff members answer your questions about the critical global issues they work on every day. In this edition, Chief Transformation Officer Kindra Halvorson addresses questions about how the COVID-19 crisis is impacting food security in the developing world.
In Nigeria, nearly half the tomato harvest is lost before ever reaching consumers. Promoting the domestic cottage processing sector has the potential to significantly decrease post-harvest loss while also improving farmer livelihoods and increasing food security for vulnerable communities.
Robin Merl worked as a TechnoServe Fellow in Zambia in 2019. His work centered around strategies for decreasing malnutrition and stunting in the most affected areas of Zambia. Before joining TechnoServe, Robin worked with McKinsey & Company in Hamburg, Germany. Currently, he is working for the Freetown City Council and mayor’s office in Sierra Leone.
In Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, over 7,000 smallholder guar farmers are improving their incomes and their lives through TechnoServe’s Sustainable Guar Initiative. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our team has come up with creative ways to continue delivering essential training and support to our clients. Today, we’re sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re adapting our daily activities in India.
TechnoServe is helping farming families in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia respond to the pandemic, recover from the crisis, and build resilience to future threats. Our new report shows how, with the right support, these farmers can overcome immense obstacles and emerge from the crisis in a position to participate in economic recovery.
In a time of crisis, soybean is providing farmers in the Cabo Delgado province of northern Mozambique with income ahead of their normal cash crops. With funding from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, TechnoServe’s ProSoja program is helping smallholder farmers in this area profit from soybean production for the first time.
India’s agricultural sector is projected to see a significant reduction in supply, demand, and value because of the COVID-19 pandemic. TechnoServe India Fellow Amy Yang and India Country Director Punit Gupta discuss how we can safeguard farmers through it.
When Adugna Feye first decided to start growing coffee in 2010, he was simply looking for a way to feed his family. After participating in a TechnoServe coffee program, he increased his income 15-fold, allowing him to not only comfortably feed his family, but invest in his children’s education, his farm, and the future.
In Andhra Pradesh, farmers face many challenges that prevent them from earning reliable incomes from their coffee, including small land size and poor agricultural practices. TechnoServe is helping these farmers improve the quality and productivity of their coffee trees and linking them to markets where they can get the best price for their harvests.
A recent blog post by The Rockefeller Foundation explains how TechnoServe has been helping to support farmers and other market actors in Kenya during the COVID-19 crisis.
