About P4CDA FarmHubs and FoodHubs
Any mention of smallholder agriculture conjures hunger, poverty, and the attendant external support to the poor producers. What is normally left unmentioned is that, if the payment made by consumers were to get to the producers, the producers would live the lives lived by the intermediaries who collect the foods from the producers and deliver to consumers. The benefit that intermediaries have to enable them supply farmers’ produce to consumers at disproportionate prices is their market information of the location of consumers that producers, particularly poor remote producers, lack. It is called information asymmetry. Academia, research and development agencies cannot be forgiven for allowing this to exist even at a time when satellite driven geospatial paradigms have come to digitally promote traceability. If smallhoder producers were to deliver directly to consumers, the price of food and the right nutrition would be affordable by the consumer. Figure 1 presents the agribusiness perspective required to organize consumers into investment units that can aggregate their food and nutrition needs through a storage infrastructure, housed together with an eatery in what GODAN’s Programme for Capacity Development in Africa (GP4CD) calls the FoodHub. It is the organized digitally driven household outlet that promotes share based investments by consumers, created as a consumer agribusiness. GODAN Programme for Capacity Development (GP4CD) promotes the creation of agribusinesses at the consumer end to create opportunity for food, nutrition, as well as supply chain management, youthful learners and researchers, in the consumer region’s locality. Consumers can then eat out at a community owned eatery as it also aggregates the orders made by households into a composite order, digitally tagged, and recorded from the consumers with the data gathered helping GODAN Programme for Capacity Development (GP4CD) profile the nutrition needs of the community to evolve a healthy eating programme for the community to promote healthy eating programmes.
On the producer end, the producers are similarly supported through a capacity building programme to investment in produce aggregation agribusiness SMEs that also provide support services to farming as it also aggregates the production at the producer hubs that are called by FarmHubs. With agricultural learners, researchers, development officers as well as government finding a place to collect and aggregate production data, this becomes a critical data sourcing dimension for upward decision making when the data is digitally aggregated and stored in a cloud infrastructure when anonymized for use by data analysts.
The consumer orders are delivered to the producers through the FoodHubs using a block chain driven platform that promotes traceability from the farm to the FarmHub to the FoodHub and to the consumers. Using this framework, farmer learning is supported using the FarmHub as the learning center where Transformation Action Learning System (TALS), integrating Gender Action Learning System (GALS) is delivered to learners, researchers, and all others.
GODAN Programme for Capacity Development (GP4CD) has developed diverse digital platforms available at GODAN Programme for Capacity Development (GP4CD) website to support the TALS and GALS delivery delivered through the continually evolving eLearning Platform the digital learning infrastructure at Impactathon.Live. GODAN Programme for Capacity Development (GP4CD) supports transformation learning that we create through data sourcing and agribusiness.