Musika

Agricultural Technology

In the agricultural technology portfolio, Musika’s focus is on improving access by the lower end of the agricultural market to new, productivity-enhancing technologies. This focus has been expanded to include the wide array of technologies, equipment and inputs available in the national, regional or international market that can improve the ability of the lower end of the market to produce, harvest, handle and store agricultural commodities.

It is Musika’s belief that the accelerated integration of technology into smallholder farming can be can seen in a wider strategic context of agricultural transformation and commercialisation that can raise farm incomes, create jobs and lower relative food prices on a national scale.

The economic case for continuing to drive investment in new technology is clear in terms of the benefits to farm, community and national economies, and the role of donor resources to support the research, testing and piloting process at the early stage of a new technology or business model can be justified.

Therefore, within the agricultural technology portfolio, Musika focuses on the following technology areas:

1. Mechanisation: Utilising lessons learned from previous industry efforts to drive smallholder mechanisation, Musika continues to support commercial players (agricultural equipment vendors, financial institutions and commercial market facilitators) to test new models of distribution for on-farm machinery (tractors, implements and harvesting equipment) and the necessary training, mentorship and oversight and after sales service that must accompany this process.

2. Irrigation: Irrigation is an area relatively unexplored by Musika in the past – largely because of an absence of reliable commercial partners willing to invest in the market development process – but it is a necessary intervention to drive on-farm productivity, utilise the farm and farm labour throughout the year and increase climate resilience through reducing reliance on the vagaries of a single rainy season. But now Musika has placed a greater effort on exploring both individual farm-based irrigation opportunities and also, where applicable, larger, market-driven block irrigation units at community level. Both opportunities require a holistic approach to not simply technology distribution but also financing and the development of the business model around the utilisation of the irrigated lands.

3. Post Harvest Solutions: In common with many developing countries, in Zambia, 20-30% of food is wasted, much of it in post-harvest losses that are easy to prevent with technologies like small metal silos or plastic crates. In India and Rwanda, such technologies have reduced losses by over 60% and increased smallholder farmers’ incomes by more than 30% and the economic case for investing in this market sector is very strong. Musika has begun to make efforts to test the applicability and marketability of various on-farm staple crop post harvest technologies.

4. Bio-technology: Innovations in biological inputs to agriculture are advancing rapidly on a regional and also national level, with the commercial farming sector driving adoption of biological solutions for plant nutrition and pest and disease control. For example, Zambian commercial farmers planted 40,000ha of soya in 2016 using biological seed dressing addressing both improved nutrition and disease control needs and the use of biological growth stimulants, mineral solubisation and pest control methods is also increasing.
Awareness and availability of biological solutions in the smallholder sector is very limited, yet these technologies have the potential to improve farm productivity and reduce inorganic fertiliser and agrochemical use, mitigating some of the negative effect on the environment and human health that intensive chemical agriculture can create.

Musika intends to work with suppliers to research, test and roll out relevant, affordable and appropriate biological solutions to the smallholder market and to provide technical advice to farmers on their use within an Integrated Pest Management framework.

Business and Finance

In this investment area, Musika focuses on improving the functionality of the agricultural supply chain through building business management capacity, upgrading management systems, integrating digital solutions and improving access to financial products and services for key actors in the agricultural market.

Within the business and finance investment area, Musika focuses on the following strategies that tackle multiple constraints in the smallholder-relevant agricultural supply chain:

Small business development: By working directly with small rural agribusinesses, Musika supports the delivery of better intermediation services to large agribusiness partners and a range of market services to smallholders that assist farmers to improve and diversify their production systems.

Musika also has a strategic interest in identifying and working with those smaller companies adding value to agricultural commodities in provincial off-line-of-rail Zambia that offer combination of:

a) A direct or indirect market opportunity to smallholder farmers in their locality (while direct market opportunities coupled with other market services has been the exclusive criteria of Musika in the past, the following three criteria are now of equal importance)
b) Non-farm employment opportunities for rural Zambians
c) Wealth creation and skill development and retention in rural Zambia
d) Benefits to the surrounding local economy in terms of the ‘last mile’ distribution of food and a corresponding impact on food prices.

Financial access: Musika stimulates the development of a wide range of appropriate and affordable financial services integrated into commercial relationships between agribusinesses, small rural businesses and smallholder farmers. Financial services can be offered by either conventional financial institutions or through the supply chain.

Promoting digital solutions: Musika supports the technology industry to identify and test digital solutions that can potentially create efficiencies and improve commercial relationships between all levels in the agricultural supply chain. Specific efforts and technical resource has been dedicated towards understanding the ‘pain points’ in the agricultural supply chain and identifying digital solutions that can create efficiencies and improve commercial relationships between all levels in the supply chain.

Structured markets: Musika supports private market systems that offer structured trade, transparency and security and an equitable distribution of the profits of agricultural trade through the supply chain. Investments that have the potential to offer such benefits and that Musika will support as opportunities arise include, but are not limited to:

a. Warehouse Receipts and Commodity Exchange Trade
b. Horticultural Wholesaling Markets
c. Livestock Auctions:

Environmental Markets

This investment area consolidates Musika’s existing work in the renewable energy sector, and also explore other opportunities for smallholder and rural community engagement in markets that combine the elements of commercial benefit and ‘value add’ market service provision with environmental protection and climate change mitigation.

Energy is an essential enabler for national and household economic development, and yet Zambia’s national power grid only covers about a quarter of the population and only 3-4% of rural households. The majority of the population without access to electricity relies on traditional biomass-derived sources of energy generation for cooking and lighting, the extraction of which is one of Zambia’s primary drivers of forest destruction and degradation.

At the same time, the country spends huge amounts on petroleum fuel imports a year. Fuel represents Zambia’s single largest imported commodity and the cost and reliability of these imports are major factors influencing the country’s economic growth.
Within the environmental markets portfolio, Musika focuses on the following areas:

1. Consumptive use of clean energy: Musika supports the development of the market for renewable energy products to tackle the crippling ‘energy poverty’ that pervades the rural economy, aimed primarily at productive use (solar irrigation, cold chain solutions, etc.) and household level use (cooking solutions, renewable fuels, etc.).

2. Productive Use of Clean Energy: Musika places an emphasis on the productive use of clean energy to drive rural economic development particularly in the agricultural space. The smallholder-related economy – from agricultural production, handling, storage and logistics through to value addition – is widely acknowledged to be chronically ‘under-powered’. Therefore, Musika is supporting the clean powering of the lower end of the agricultural market through support to the suppliers of, for instance, solar sprayers, cold chain solutions and irrigation solutions to demonstrate and roll out their products and services.

3. Production of Clean Energy: Musika’s efforts in this area is to stimulate private investment in the development of supply chains in which the rural poor are the producers of sources of renewable energy, primarily through biomass and biofuel production and agricultural waste aggregation systems, linked closely to Musika’s work in the agricultural diversification investment area.

4. Sustainable Natural Resource Utilisation: Musika is explore opportunities for intervention in, for example, honey production and wild mushroom extraction. The focus for Musika is to explore innovative commercial opportunities for investment that directly deliver financial reward for rural communities for environmental protection practices such as the fledgling – and currently struggling – carbon markets that in theory at least pay for the provision of ‘environmental services’ by rural communities.

Gender

Gender inequality in agriculture has often been cited as a key challenge to achieving inclusive agricultural market growth.

Studies have shown that despite smallholder farmers facing specific gender related constraints in accessing productive resources, the constraints are more acute among female farmers who also face cultural barriers in their access to, ownership of, and control over productive resources which are all critical elements in determining a farmer’s capacity to adopt such technologies. When disaggregated by gender lines, women account for over 70% of the rural agricultural workforce and produce the majority of food in both male headed households and female headed households.

This large proportion of agricultural production that is attributable to women makes them important agents in agricultural markets. However, there is very little specific effort from the private sector to recognize and harness this critical role that women play in unlocking the growth potential of rural agricultural markets (IAPRI,2015).

Given the above, the productivity and economic empowerment of women is therefore a logical priority for Musika.
This priority is warranted both in terms of the importance of women’s agricultural production as a source of economic growth, and as a source of rural livelihoods and poverty reduction.

Musika acknowledges that gender is critical in achieving sustainable and inclusive growth in rural agricultural markets and recognises that the term “poor rural farmers”, entails both men and women in the rural settings of Zambia. Moreover, that both these men and women benefit from development interventions differently. With this, Musika commits to mainstreaming gender in all of its operations with its private sector clients and day-to-day activities.

Musika takes a four-pronged approach to improving the participation in and benefit from improved agricultural markets by women farmers and women-run small rural businesses:

• Internal Capacity Development
• Knowledge and Skills Development:
• Engendering Agricultural Market Development
• Gender Responsive Research

Apart from Gender, three other key themes transect all the work that Musika undertakes in its practice areas and these are:

• Environmental Stewardship
• Agricultural Markets and Nutrition
• Business Environment and
• Land Rights

Aquaculture

Musika has partnered with WorldFish (WF) to help pilot innovations (both technologies and approaches) with smallholders through the private sector under the Aquaculture Technical, Vocational, and Entrepreneurship Training for Improved Private Sector and Smallholder Skills project. To enable this to happen, the private sector’s capacities must be developed to engage with smallholders participating in the aquaculture value chain. Musika excels in both these areas and is a premier partner of choice. 

The organisation operates around four principles that have a proven track record in delivering benefits to the rural poor through fostering growth in the private agricultural market. These principles include: 1) a focus on the market system and economic growth; 2) investment risk mitigation; 3) market facilitation and ‘honest brokerage’; and 4) innovation. Musika’s approach to reducing poverty and creating wealth in rural Zambia involves stimulating the development of a supportive market environment that provides
long term and sustainable opportunities for farmers to invest in their own production and to use the markets to graduate out of poverty. This approach is consistent with the Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) methodology which is based on stimulating change within the market systems upon which the poor are dependent in order to stimulate greater and more beneficial involvement of poor people in economic development.

Additionally, Musika’s approach to reducing poverty and creating wealth in rural Zambia involves stimulating business relationships between the corporate sector and the smallholder farming economy in which there is some form of ‘value addition’ to the transaction. This ‘value’ could be in the form of embedded extension, access to finance, technology transfer, forward pricing, assured off-take, supply contracts and other market services that give not only the opportunity, but also the technical knowledge and confidence to smallholders to invest in and improve their farming businesses.

In all its operations, Musika makes it a priority to understand the role of women in agricultural markets and ensure that they participate in and benefit from improved market conditions. It also continues to take into consideration the potential impact of its operations on the environment and aim to mitigate environmental risks on the health of the natural environment and that of the rural population.

The Objective of the Aquaculture Technical, Vocational, and Entrepreneurship Training (TEVET) for Improved Private Sector and Smallholder Skills project is to develop the aquaculture knowledge and practical skills of students and smallholder fish farmers (especially women and female youth) participating in TEVET to enable them to find gainful employment in the private sector and increase the productivity and profitability of their farms. The project will pilot an upgraded aquaculture curriculum with NRDC for scaling in other TEVET institutions in Zambia. It will also enhance the technical education, vocational, and entrepreneurship skills of smallholder fish farmers and increase their linkages to
input/output markets and entrepreneurship opportunities by testing a private sector-led extension and services delivery model.

Musika will lead the design and implementation of the TEVET-focused smallholder component of the project that will be implemented in Northern and Luapula Provinces together with support from WF. Among the key activities, Musika will assess actors in the aquaculture supply chain in terms of current or potential ‘value’ to the market, and in particular their willingness and ability to make sustained and commercially oriented investments in developing the smallholder aquaculture market. These should
also be willing to integrate a gender-and youth-focused lens in their business models.

From the assessment, a portfolio of clients will be developed which the project will work with including seed, feed and equipment suppliers, formal fish buyers, processors, auxiliary service providers (finance and transportation), and SMEs that will act as ‘last mile’ distributors of inputs, training, extension service and/or ‘first mile’ aggregators of outputs.

Additionally, Musika will support the private sector to carry out the necessary market research to identify commercially-oriented fish farmers and organise them for easier training and skills development, input supply, and linkages with output markets. It will also leverage funds from other sources for early stage investment support on a cost-share basis, increase the capacity of private actors to deliver outreach, farmer training and extension services, technology demonstration and testing, and capacity development of supply chain intermediaries.

The four-year project intends to bring over 1,000 smallholder fish farmers into an ‘improved’ market environment that facilitates, encourages and supports investments by farmers in their own fish farming enterprises. This will lead to increases in production and productivity that ultimately results in improvements in farm incomes. Of these farmers, the project aims for 40 percent female farmer participation, and 35 percent female youth farmer participation.

Nutrition

Despite significant progress over recent decades, poor nutrition remains a colossal and universal problem, with one in three people on the planet affected by some form of malnutrition.

Malnutrition in Zambia has many causal factors, with poverty obviously being a major driver. Some households simply do not have access to sufficient food (from their own production as well as purchased food) to be able to eat nutritionally dense meals each day. Other households have adequate access to food across the year, but eat a nutritionally poor diet owing to entrenched behaviours. Across both cohorts, diets are predominantly plantbased (especially starchy plants) and proteins and vitamins are not consumed regularly and in sufficient quantities. Zambians consume the highest percentage of maize as a proportion of diet globally.

With financial support from Irish Aid, Musika is working towards achieving increased consumption of a diverse range of nutritious foods including legumes, livestock and fresh fruit and vegetables, among poor households, especially amongst women and children, and within smallholder farming and rural communities.

Through its market-based approach to development, Musika seeks to improve diets and raise levels of nutrition in Zambia through implementing interventions focusing on strengthening the supply chain of nutritious food products, by facilitating beneficial commercial relationships between smallholder producers of nutritious agricultural commodities and food processors.:

The project dubbed; ‘Making Zambia’s Agricultural Markets work for Nutrition’ will be implemented countrywide, but with ‘case study’ districts of Mongu, Mumbwa and Mazabuka between the period 2018 to 2022.

Effort will be directed to the following:
Production – support the increased production, retention and consumption of an increasingly diverse range of nutritious foods throughout the year by smallholder households, especially amongst women and children.
Processing – support the increased capacity of the small and medium scale, rurally based food-processing sector to produce a range of high quality nutritious foods to target the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ food retail market
Distribution – support improvement of the operational capacity of the food-processing sector to create distribution channels for affordable nutritious foods and relevant information back into the rural market.

Musika believes its efforts will result in it building the capacity of the agricultural and food market systems to improve:

• Availability of nutritious foods, pertaining to increased physical access to foods, both on farm and within retail markets in the rural community
• Affordability of nutritious foods, through improving the efficiency of the supply chain from raw material origination to processing to retail, and tailoring products, packaging and distribution channels to serve a ‘bottom of the pyramid’ demand
• Acceptability of nutritious foods, through leveraging the process of product marketing to influence behaviour change towards investment in nutritious foods within rural communities.

The ultimate goal is to increase consumption of a diverse range of nutritious foods among poor Zambians, especially amongst women and children and within smallholder farming and rural communities.

Grants

Musika through its policy of working with prospective partners under M4P program provides grants through a cost sharing mechanisms in the negotiated and agreed budgets.

Normally there are 4 types of cost sharing grants which are provide by Musika as follows;

1. Cost sharing support to firms with thresholds up to $50,000.00
2. Above $50,000.00 up to $ 100,000.00
3. Above $100,000.00 up to $150,000.00
4. Above $150,000.00 up to $250,000.00( Normally advertised in our local media)

For grants falling under number 2 a basic due diligence (assessing management and financial systems of clients on basic level) is required before the funds can be paid out.

For grants falling under 3 and 4 a complete due diligence(assessing management and financial systems of clients on a detailed level) is conducted before the funds can be paid out.

For number 4 a selection process is followed right through to the due diligence and contract signing process before fund are disbursed.

Other requirements needed are in the Client information requirements form.

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