Submitted by Ann APEKEY on Wed, 05/07/2017 - 04:25 Permalink
Kindly click here for a guide we developed for agribusiness incubation which may be useful going forward.
Submitted by Ann APEKEY on Wed, 05/07/2017 - 04:16 Permalink
Apart from targeting women already involved in agribusiness, we need to build the skills of other women especially young women to be involved in agripreneurship. they can be attached to the businesses of some already successful business women during a preriod of metorship and incubation to enable them gain handson experience and also develop their own businesses.
Submitted by Ann APEKEY on Wed, 05/07/2017 - 04:09 Permalink
There is the need for agribusiness incubation for women as one of the main approaches to empower women . This can target women already involved in agribusiness and value addition in the value chain as well as new entrants to the market. By incubation we are talking of a business support process that enables the acceleration of successful business development and start-up for the identified business persons who in this case are women. Such services can vary from advisory services, networking and facilitating access to finance and even product development or improvement.
With and earlier experience with a FARA pilot project called UNiBRAIN which brought together business persons ,academia and private sector, the project used the technical expertise of the universities and business owners and banks to help develop start-ups for the selected agribusinesses . The project was not a women specific one but we developed toolkits that guided the integration of gender into the incubation process. Moreover, since most women need the basics in entrepreneurship, the bank could encourage an incubation process which will start with “hand holding” for these women, teaching them how to even handle the low hanging fruits in agribusiness through the incubation support process to the time where they have fully matured into profitable business ventures.
In cases where women are already involved in agribusiness, they can be assisted to improve on their business plans, product enhancement and access to financing and markets.
Submitted by Ann APEKEY on Wed, 05/07/2017 - 03:35 Permalink
What are the challenges to women’s engagement in priority value chains, agribusiness and industries, including value addition, and commercialization of agricultural products?
Apart from the issues of poverty and lack of capital, skills and social norms which are key factors hindering women’s effective and profitable involvement in value chains and agribusiness, women have what we call “powerless social networks” so they may not have acess to the necessary or appropriate role models for the relevant information they need to engage in successful business enterprises. They are therefore not be able to take advantage of whatever new or old business opportunities that exist to improve upon their businesses.
We also need to take into consideration the fact that women can participate at different nodes of the agricultural value chain and be successful agripreneurs given the right guidance and training. The key challenge is how to provide the right mix of PPP, entrepreneurship and the effective participation of women in value chains. Given the loads of research in agricultural research and development, how do we include research findings in agribusiness to ensure women do benefit from them and adopt them to enhance their own economic development?
we could have remote
Submitted by Ann APEKEY on Wed, 05/07/2017 - 04:31 Permalink
we coulld have remote mentoring targeting successful men and women who have been involved especially in the particular value chains for new business entrants and at the same time also exploit the possibility of having a direct and well structured mentoring programmes for more successful and mature entrepreneurs to mentor women who want to go into agribusiness or who are struggling to find their feet in their businesses