Commercial Agriculture for Smallholders and Agribusiness (CASA) is a multi-year programme focused on increasing the economic opportunities for smallholder farmers as well as the commercial viability of agribusinesses. TechnoServe is managing the CASA through the Technical Assistance Facility (TAF) to provide grants and technical assistance to agribusinesses implementing projects under the CASA initiative.
The Inclusive Aggregator Model (IAM) is a project under the CASA-TAF which is run by Farmerline, an AgriTech service provider in Ghana. IAM is a 5-year project which aims to develop a network of aggregators in the soybean, maize, and cashew value chains.
The objective of CASA-TAF is to work with agribusinesses and smallholder farmers to increase rural income generation opportunities, working with the premise that coordinated provision of inputs, advisory services and crop offtake via aggregators can drive both transformational impact for farmers and long-term commercial value for Farmerline.
PDA’s Role
PDA has been engaged as an external consultant to assess the impact of IAM on smallholder farmers’ incomes, resilience, and food security. Additionally, PDA will evaluate the business operations, profitability and expansion plans of the aggregators. Furthermore, the assessment will consider the commercial benefits for Farmerline.
The project activities include the conduct of a baseline, midline and endline evaluation of the project throughout the Northern, Upper West and Bono East regions of Ghana along the maize, soya, and cashew value chains.
Our Progress So Far
The PDA team has developed quantitative and qualitative data collection tools for the evaluation and the plan for approaching the baseline study. Enumerator training has just ended, and teams have been dispatched to the field for initial data collection. Following this, data will be analyzed and a comprehensive evaluation report will be produced.
Stay tuned for updates.