Kilimo Trust is an independent organization working on agriculture for development across the East Africa Community (EAC) Region - in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda - and more recently in the new Republic of South Sudan.
It promotes regional solutions to local problems to make agricultural markets work better for the reduction of poverty and elimination of hunger. Kilimo Trust implements and manages programmes and projects in partnership with and/or on behalf of governments, international and regional organizations, and the private sector. The Trust spearheads market-driven solutions designed to "deliver the promise of the East African Common market" with respect to reducing poverty and eliminating hunger in the region.
Kilimo Trust is committed to supporting the people of East African Community (EAC) Region, to achieve market-based solutions to food and nutrition security. Therefore, the core business of the Trust is tosupport the transformation of food and nutrition security in the EAC Region away from high risk subsistence farming into lower risk trade-based systems.
To facilitate this, the Trust is a coordinating HUB for regional markets development programs providing regional solutions to local problems in ways that enhance security of incomes, food, and nutrition in the region.
The ambition is to achieve a trade-based food security system in which all consumers including those who are in farming obtain most of the food they consume by purchasing food that is increasingly processed, stored and distributed to meet different needs and preferences.
Why is this important? Because, the very low levels of specialisation in the production of food commodities by smallholders within EAC, dominated by subsistence farming, encourage the production of food commodities in unsuitable agro-ecological zones, leading to perpetuation of hunger and poverty.
History
They began in 2005 as an organization funding agricultural research focused on technical innovations.
In 2008 they introduced new programmes focused on value-chains and how small and medium scale farmers can access profitable markets. They supported a portfolio of over 30 projects spread across the region, and dealing with strengthening agricultural value chains; building ‘investable entities” of smallholders to enable them become key players in local, national, and regional value chains; improving financial services for small and medium scale agricultural enterprises; and creating avenues for scaling-up technical, policy, and institutional innovations.
Their experience has shown them that, to reduce poverty, efforts must be directed at establishing viable “investable entities” of small and medium size agricultural enterprises that can meet quantities, quality standards, and timely deliveries demanded by other actors in the value chains, as well as the profitability levels demanded by investors and financiers.
Their work has built such entities and then supported tri-partite partnership building between the investable entities of agri-SMEs, large scale agri-business and/or agro- processors, and commercial banks.
