Climate change and increasingly sporadic rains add to the many challenges facing maize farmers in northern Nigeria. Inadequate storage facilities lead to farmers having to choose between storing in sub-optimal conditions, or selling during harvest with everyone else, taking lower prices from traders.
PrOpCom Mai-karfi, partnering with AFEX, aimed to address this storage constraint and add value at the same time by grading the maize provided for harvest and linking the farmers who stored grain with a wider network of buyers. This was done by initiating a Warehousing Receipt System (WRS).
However, challenges in the pilot phase meant the initial model had to be refined. Recent evidence indicates that while the intervention adds value to the farmers, it is not quite in the manner anticipated.