Nampya Farmers Market

In most of the western world, the agricultural supply chain is intricately connected and integrated from farm to table, but the situation is quite different in Uganda and many other African countries.

The mostly smallholder farmers suffer a significant gap in connectedness and infrastructure and as a result, lose over 1.3 billion tons of produce a year to post-harvest spoilage. Add climate change to this scenario and the problems multiply because food spoilage process is often quickly expedited. This forces farmers to sell what they quickly can – and at huge discounts – or risk their produce rotting, keeping them trapped in a poverty cycle.

In addition, the urban population also finds it hard to access quality, safe and fresh food due to massive distribution delays and poor handling by third parties, leading to massive food waste - the cost of which is passed on to end consumers who are paying high price points (often 200% on average) for sem-fresh food from retailers. 

Further more, according to UNHCR, Uganda is a ground for refugees from East Africa and the neighboring regions. However, food shortage becomes serious for refugee settlements because 160,000 refugees, who flee from the civil wars, come to Uganda every year. Humanitarian agencies spend extensive resources on imported food aid for refugees, but 40% does not reach the intended beneficiaries. This is due to an inefficient and uneven food distribution system of the ground teams.

After COVID-19 spread all over Uganda, the government formed a task force team to support vulnerable communities with relief food. Ultimately, due to the continued unequal distribution of food and embezzlement, the team lost public trust. It takes a lot of effort for aid organizations to procure food regionally, leading to high imports. Private donors hardly have any possibility to donate food aid because there’s a problem of ordering and distribution.

To protect food security in the country, Nampya Farmers Market provides solar-powered micro-warehouses near farm clusters, making it easier and more affordable for smallholder farmers to store and insure their surplus harvest. We also run a USSD-based, tech-enabled food supply platform that connects rural farmers directly to urban food retailers, bypassing exploitative middlemen. This allows farmers to sell their produce at fair prices, promoting economic self-sufficiency and supporting sustainable food supply chains. With mobile money payments integrated into the system, Nampya facilitates smooth, direct transactions, helping greengrocers, hotels, and restaurants source better-quality, competitively-priced food straight from the farmgate to their doorstep. 

Farmers use their simple, basic and feature phones to advertise their ready-to-harvest crops on the platform and the food retailers can conveniently order them from the platform via mobile app or a USSD short code. Nampya then delivers the crops directly to the food stores, hotels and restaurants through our distribution network.

Besides successfully connecting rural tenant farmers with urban food retailers, Nampya Farmers Market also operates a food donation service connecting relief donors and vulnerable groups. Donors can easily donate food to vulnerable groups via Nampya platform. They can make the order, and then Nampya delivers the relief food to the donor, donor-agent or directly to the beneficiaries. In this way, it becomes sustainably cheaper for donors to source food relief from the region.

Nampya Farmers Market is poised to drive a massive positive impact on incomes, resilience, and food security across Africa’s predominant but underserved smallholder farmers. 

Across the continent, farmers face a myriad of challenges from low access to capital, to poor market linkages, to weak infrastructure and logistics. Aggregation and efficiencies are also difficult to achieve since most farms are small: in Uganda, 38 million smallholder farmers till fewer than 10 acres each. Furthermore, farmers are facing dramatic climate change impacts and environmental conditions so yields are declining even as land being farmed increases.  

While many organizations are targeting on-farm productivity, few are addressing the post-harvest challenges that keep farmers’ income down. According to FAO, 37% (or 120-170 kg/year per capita) of food produced in Sub-Saharan Africa is lost between production and consumption due to lack of storage facilities and low access to liquidity. Those challenges also force smallholders to sell immediately after harvest when market prices are lowest, even as intermediaries can resell their produce at huge margins later. 

Nampya Farmers Market is providing the infrastructure for farmers to store their produce, connect them to markets, improve access to credit and secure better prices. We do build and lease solar powered micro-warehouses at close proximity to the farm clusters/communities making it cheap and easily accessible to smallholder farmers to store and insure their harvest. Using a USSD platform, farmers are able to efficiently store and transparently trade their produce. By solar cooling, safely storing, and selling at optimal prices through our marketplace (platform), farmers using Nampya’s micro-warehouses have increased incomes by up to 90% while avoiding storage losses.

Thus, as Nampya rapidly scales up storage units across Central Uganda and beyond, we can exponentially increase impact. Just reaching 1% of Ugandan smallholders would impact 380,000 livelihoods directly. With robust measurement frameworks in place, quantified income improvements and post-harvest loss reduction for each additional farmer will clearly showcase our value chain approach lifting smallholders out of cycles of poverty.

• Plot 34 Namayumba Health center IV lane P.O.Box 36099 Kampala, Unknown 256
• https://www.nampyafarmersmarket.com
• Mark Matovu
• +256785134155
• m.mark@nampyafarmersmarket.com