2022 Annual Report

In 2022, the invasion of Ukraine, rising inflation, and other crises combined to threaten nutrition and food security around the world.

It was the latest crack in a global food system that struggles every year to get enough nutritious food to the people who need it. But a growing private sector approach is now changing “business as usual” for the food industry.

The success of this approach was proven with a recent, years-long initiative in three African countries (SAPFF). One of the most effective ways of improving nutrition at scale is through fortification of staple foods with essential vitamins and minerals. So TechnoServe worked with food processing companies to create compelling business incentives for improving the fortification of their products.

This approach included:

• Working with individual processors to overcome business challenges that hindered adequate fortification
• Creating a “Micronutrient Fortification Index” that annually ranks food processors on their fortification, creating brand recognition around fortification quality and harnessing the competitive nature of businesses to incentivize improved fortification performance 
• Establishing an annual “Food Processing and Leadership Forum” that publicly highlights the importance of food fortification and provides a forum for sharing progress and ideas

Leveraging the private sector to improve food fortification was a relatively novel approach–but it’s now being scaled around the world. In 2022, TechnoServe began a multi-million dollar global initiative funded by USAID that puts businesses at the core of the solution while strategically engaging with the public, private, and civil society sectors.

Another large-scale initiative led by TechnoServe will help institute a model of technical assistance across Africa and Asia for food processors to realize business success through improved fortification, while strengthening their contribution to the fight against malnutrition.

It’s a promising sign of momentum in a world where food security and nutrition are more critical than ever. And the secret to its effectiveness was summarized by a food industry titan himself, Aliko Dangote: 

“When companies champion their role in delivering healthy food for consumers, this also delivers good business outcomes.”

Like many cities around the world, Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, has struggled to manage pollution from plastic, paper, and other contaminants. The amount of solid waste generated by the city’s growing population is increasing by 5% every year, risking contamination of waterways and other environments.

However, with this challenge comes an opportunity for enterprising people. 

Halima Awol is one such person. A former tailor, Halima was unable to return to work after giving birth to her first child, leaving her family to rely solely on her husband’s low salary. But that changed when she discovered a new business training program.

TechnoServe trains young people and women like Halima through the LIWAY program, funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), helping them create better economic opportunities through environmentally sustainable means. One of these opportunities was a regenerative business solution to the litter problem in Addis Ababa: waste collection and recycling. Altogether, TechnoServe has helped women and youth to start 117 waste-collection micro-enterprises, which collect solid waste to sell to larger recycling firms. 

And now, Halima is one of them. Joining with seven other women, she started the Aman and Halima Recycling Association, and now makes roughly $130 a month, once an almost unimaginable sum. “I am now able to support my family,” she says.

Her association has been able to save more than $4,500 towards investments and business expansion, and has hired hundreds of young people to collect plastic waste, giving them the opportunity to improve their incomes on a daily basis. 

Altogether, the program has helped create nearly 6,000 new jobs and to strengthen over 8,000–half of which are for women. It’s another way that regenerative business approaches are helping fight poverty and environmental degradation at the same time.

When Aditi Madan moved to India’s capital city, she immediately missed the cuisine of her northeast home region, at the foothills of the Himalayas. “While in New Delhi, I always craved momos [steamed dumplings], a staple food in my hometown,” she says. “I could see that people in Delhi were interested in this type of food, but the city’s offerings were quite limited.” 

So she started her own food company–BluePine Foods–aiming to share “real, healthy Himalayan food with people across India and ultimately around the world.” She overcame many initial challenges, but struggled to expand her business as she’d hoped.

She soon learned of a TechnoServe program helping women entrepreneurs grow their businesses–a key factor in improving women’s equality and reducing poverty. Working with a TechnoServe advisor, Aditi soon improved key business skills, while gaining a new understanding of concepts she thought she understood before. 

“Something that surprised me was that I had to unlearn so many things to relearn new things,” she recalls. But she soon applied the new knowledge to improving her business. “For BluePine Foods, participating in the accelerator program has been a beautiful journey.”

In 2022, Aditi landed a spot on “Shark Tank India,” where she pitched investors on funding BluePine Foods. She was thrilled when she won $100,000 in startup funding and her company experienced a surge in sales.

Aditi now has big plans for expanding her once-fledgling business. “I would like to see BluePine Foods as the number one Himalayan food processing company in India and even in the world,” she says. And she wants to see other women achieve the same kind of business success.

“Women have to self-motivate,” she says. “Even if you have a family, husband, parents, etc., only you can know your business’s vision and future…ultimately, success is up to you.”

Cattle contribute roughly 11% of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions–but they can be a crucial source of income for people working to escape poverty. Jaime Cortés is one of them.

Jaime and his father run a small dairy farm in Jalisco, Mexico. They worked hard to turn a profit, but ran into rough times in 2014. At times, they worried their business might not be able to survive.

Soon, however, the Cortes family discovered a way to turn their dairy farm around. They soon joined a program where TechnoServe, in partnership with Danone’s Ecosystem Fund and UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), was helping hundreds of dairy farmers in Mexico to improve their incomes through more productive, sustainable dairy farming and business practices.

In addition to better business and farming skills, Jaime also learned how to improve the environmental sustainability of his farm, through practices like changing cattle diets to produce less methane; reforesting land; and installing solar panels, among other methods.

Altogether, this initiative has helped small-scale dairy farmers in Mexico to nearly triple their incomes, while reducing their farms’ carbon emissions by 13%. They have a more reliable market, too. Danone Mexico now buys 24% of its milk in Mexico from these small-scale producers–including the Cortes family.

Applying their new skills and knowledge, the family is now reliably turning a profit from their dairy farm. Among the environmental and economic benefits: solar panels on their roof. “We haven’t paid an electricity bill in four years,” reports Jaime.

This model of supporting small-scale producers to make changes that are both economically and environmentally beneficial is at the core of TechnoServe’s regenerative business strategy–and a necessary model for addressing the twin problems of poverty and climate change.

“[This] is a very good social program for small producers like me,” Jaime Cortés reflects. “With this kind of project, you secure your future and your well-being.”

Severina Paul Mwakateba founded the food processing business AA Nafaka in Tanzania in 2012. She was excited to buy from local farmers–most of them women–while increasing the supply of high-quality food like fortified flours, rice, and sunflower oil for local consumers.

But after many successful years, COVID-19 restrictions and school closures damaged AA Nafaka’s sales and product distribution. The company was forced to lay off seven of its employees and decrease its purchases from smallholders and crop aggregators by 60%.

Its struggles mirrored those of food businesses across Africa. Positioned in the critical middle of the supply chain, these companies’ troubles then resulted in lost income and markets for smallholder farmers, less access to healthy food for consumers, and financial pain for millions of small food businesses.

In 2022, TechnoServe worked with African food businesses like AA Nafaka to help them rebound from the crisis–and create positive spillover effects across the supply chain. TechnoServe’s work complemented resiliency grants to these businesses from the Visa Foundation, as part of the Coalition for Farmer-Allied Intermediaries (CFAI), led by organizations actively serving 600+ African food businesses.

TechnoServe advisors helped AA Nafaka adapt its buying and marketing approaches to the volatile market conditions. The team also helped the company improve the utilization rate of its processing facilities, and develop an inclusive business plan to keep the company on a sustainable path.

As a result, AA Nafaka was able to recover quickly. It rehired three of its employees who had been laid off. And it purchased more than $20,000 of crops directly from 112 smallholder farmers–80% of whom were women–and a roughly equal amount from an aggregator that bought directly from smallholder farmers. 

Today, AA Nafaka is working to implement even more of its new business plan. This will allow the company not only to boost its sales and profits, but to increase the supply of nutritious, fortified foods for vulnerable communities and improve the livelihoods of more than 2,000 local farmers.

In Honduras, as in many other parts of the world, women in rural areas often lack the opportunities and resources to earn good incomes. In Jicarito, a small town outside the capital Tegucigalpa, 12 women joined together to chart a different path.

They formed a farmer business organization called Mujeres Valientes (“Courageous Women” in Spanish), and sought out business and farming training from TechnoServe. “We needed to work together to improve economic security for the sake of our children, our homes, and our communities,” says María Castillo, the association’s president.

Smallholder farmers in Honduras can improve their incomes through cash crops like coffee, and their food security through crops like beans. TechnoServe helped farmers in María’s community on both fronts, through:

• Training on regenerative agriculture that would improve yields while reducing harmful environmental impact
• Helping farmers form and strengthen producer organizations to improve their technical knowledge, bargaining power, and market connections
• Helping farmers achieve better financing and establish lasting relationships with reliable, well-paying markets for their crops

As a result, nearly 35,000 farmers have increased their incomes–coffee farmers by an average of 111%, and bean farmers by an average of 69%.

María and her “courageous women” also saw a major difference. “Before, we sold to a middleman for half price, but now we have more market options,” she says. And while the program has technically ended, her farmer group–and her larger community–continue to apply what they’ve learned, and to reap the benefits.

“The profits from the sale of the bean crop are used to buy food and medicine and to pay for house repairs,” she says. “This [work] opened the door for us to have an extra income in our homes and thus give my family a better life.”