Value Addition and Cottage Industry Development in Africa (VACID Africa) is a social enterprise focused in promoting the linkage of grassroots-focused development policy institution based interventions.
We use entrepreneurship, and with it the linkage to markets, as the vehicle to promote ICT backed innovation and collaboration. We mobilize communities to create grassroots enterprises that we support using our knowledge based education and research efforts. These two components fortify our work in nutrition and food security. We collaborate with other research and technology innovation institutions and universities to ensure that resourceful networks and network actors support the community enterprises.
VACID Africa promotes development by re-investing whatever we generate from our consulting work into promoting community investments in capacity building, in developing cheaper ICT solutions to support agricultural value chains, and in promoting market linkages as much as it also supports our own operational existence.
We support activities create inroads into policy institutions that are the government and donors. We create ICT driven learning the vehicle for generating incomes, which we then reinvest in the value chain driven activities that we carry out. We promote share-based investment vehicles by the communities by promoting the use of asset-based investment cooperatives. The assets we consider necessary include:
VACID Africa currently collaborates with CISCO, Telecentre.org Foundation Academy, Intel and Ministry of Agriculture’s Agribusiness Department in Kenya.
Vacid Africa is now operational in other countries such as Sudan, Malawi and Zimbabwe.