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A technology to avoid cassava spoilage in Cameroon
- Completed project
CassVita has developed an innovation that combines both technology and information to minimize post-harvest cassava losses and thus improve income for farmers.
Project ported by:
Context
Cassava is grown by 20 million farmers in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. However, it has a shelf life of 2 days after harvest. Consequently, about 40% of crops are lost, resulting in an inability for the farming community to benefit from it, which leads to significant loss in income. Globally, 93 million tons of spoilage are recorded annually (Naziri et al, 2014).
Minimising cassava spoilage could be a solution to alleviate poverty in farming communities as farmers would be able to monetize more of their harvest and therefore have more sustainable livelihoods.
Innovation
The innovation developed by CassVita is based on two dimensions:
- A transformation technology, in powder form, that increases the shelf-life of cassava from 2 days to 18 months. Through its cooperative, CassVita has already piloted this technology and observed a decrease in cassava losses (from 40% to 10%) of the harvest, with an increase in income of 400% for the farmers participating in these tests.
- An informational and coordinating technology for farmers, funded by FID, with an alert system and a notification tool that improves the synchronization of the cassava cultivation and production.
Specifically, the farmers’ relationship technology aims at:
- minimising difficulty in managing farmer coordination as CassVita scales to other farming communities;
- facilitating payments and encouraging saving habits for farmers by integrating mobile money (1% of CassVita’s farmers have bank accounts);
- standardizing the transformation process, improving CassVita’s ability to make projections and maximize the efficacy of the transformation technology.
Results and lessons learned
CassVita successfully developed a Farmer Relationship Technology (FRT), following several relevant modifications and improvements. The application centralizes farm and farmer data, including cassava varieties, activities, milestones, and expected yields, and enables the generation of customizable reports for performance tracking and procurement analysis.
Farmers now receive SMS notifications with reminders about procurement schedules, quarterly trainings, and payments. Payments are fully automated through mobile money, which has 100% penetration among in-scope farmers and is their preferred method of payment.
One of the team’s key lessons learned was that the primary cost was not the development of the application itself, but rather driving adoption among farmers, since that only 8% of farmers who had participated in the initial test had adopted the technology by the end of the grant. Given the high cost of scaling adoption, the team chose at this stage to focus on building and refining the technology, postponing large-scale adoption efforts to a future phase.
Nevertheless, the implementation of the farmers’ relationship technology has reduced cassava spoilage to nearly zero and increased farmers’ average daily income to €3.08 per capita, for the farmers who participated in the project.
Following these developments, CassVita secured Stage 1 funding to conduct pilot testing.
Expected results
CassVita intends to reduce cassave spoilage from 10% of harvest to under 5%, leading to an increase in per capita income per day and facilitate financial inclusion for farmers.
If the project is successful, CassVita plans to evaluate the impact of the technology with a randomized controlled trial and scale it to more farming communities in Cameroon.
Projects
Projects funded by FID
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