Boosting incomes by increasing access to markets
ACDI/VOCA partnered with World Vision to administer the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded PRORENDA, Raising the Incomes of Smallholder Farmers in the Central Highlands of Angola: A Model Project for Improving Agricultural Value Chains in Post-Conflict Nations. The four-year subgrant from World Vision lasted from September 2008 to August 2012.
PRORENDA worked with 27,000 smallholder families—60 percent of whom were women—to help them double their household incomes through competitive value chains for potatoes, onions and beans in the central highlands of Angola. An additional 73,000 smallholder families benefited from an innovative and scalable methodology of extended farmer training that increaseed their incomes and farming capacity.
In 2009, ACDI/VOCA worked to enable actors in the selected value chains to increase their access to urban markets by improving information flows and knowledge of effective processing practices and marketing strategies. In addition, ACDI/VOCA conducted a value chain training and analysis and sent two volunteers to strengthen farmer organization capacity through cooperative development training and marketing training.