Enhancing Rice Production in Côte d’Ivoire

This joint project with the Louis Dreyfus Foundation and FairMatch Support aims to establish the framework for a sustainable rice supply chain from smallholder farmers to mills in Boundiali, northern Côte d’Ivoire.

To achieve this, the project worked across three streams between 2018 and 2020:

• Technical assistance, providing agricultural support and training to 3,054 smallholder farmers to improve crop yields and quality through better agricultural practices.
• Cooperative training for 10 cooperatives and aggregators, increasing their management capacity and helping farmers find attractive markets for their produce in the absence of formal buyers. This positioned the cooperatives to play a pivotal role in professionalizing the rice sector in years to come, as essential elements such as input finance, improved seed access and small-scale mechanization are put into place.
• Access to markets and professional processing, linking producers with processors to give farmers a more stable market for their product. This included coaching farmer cooperatives, setting up contracts, setting up and fulfilling agreements regarding volumes, prices, quality and logistics, and coordinating quality management.

As a result of these actions, farmers saw higher yields (up 76% versus the baseline year) and improved product quality, and are becoming professional trading partners in the value chain, as the first step from subsistence to small-scale commercial agriculture.

The project is being extended for two years, where the focus will be on securing market access for the rice produced through identification of market outlets, reinforced cooperative management, technical assistance to farmer groups, training and enhanced support for women farmers in particular, as well as completion and potential scale-up of a seed production pilot.

Read more in the Louis Dreyfus Foundation’s 2020 Activity Report.