A technology to improve the situation of cassava farmers in Cameroon

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 in 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.

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%.
• An informational and coordinating technology for farmers, funded by FID, with an alert system and a notification tool that will improve the synchronization of the cassava cultivation and production.

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’ farmers have bank accounts);
• standardizing the transformation process, improving CassVita’s ability to make projections.

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.