The future of agribusiness support services: new challenges for an old profession

The role of advisors in agribusiness is ever changing. Whereas conventional advisors mainly work with farmers, in the 2SCALE programme iCRA equipped these intermediaries to become agribusiness coaches. A key challenge: how to embed the coaching services into the cost structure of the value chain? The below stories from Nigeria show how agribusiness cluster (ABC) actors themselves find ways to continue the coaching services and cover for its costs.

Coaching after project funds end: ‘We want to pay for you to stay!’ (Maize-Nigeria partnership)

“If you had to pay to continue getting coaching services after the 2SCALE project ends, would you pay – or would you rather drop the whole thing?”

As iCRA agribusiness trainer of the maize partnership in Nigeria, I – Gbenga Idowu – was very interested to see what would happen next. So with this question hanging in the air, I started a discussion with about twenty representatives of the four maize ABCs in Nigeria. The participants represented producers, input suppliers, marketers and women processors conducting maize business in towns across three states in the South West zone of Nigeria. The question was greeted with a moment of deep silence in the room. The participants seemed to be deeply challenged by it, as the coaching services for their clusters over the years have been funded through 2SCALE.

Then the silence was broken. One after the other started sharing the major business breakthroughs in their clusters and in their individual businesses, which they attributed to the coaching services. The high value they placed on the combination of technical, organisational and business relationship building services provided to them was not in doubt. 

As if something had triggered a latent potential in the group, the participants started to come up with ideas on how to raise the needed amount within the internal cost structure of the maize partnership. The participants demonstrated their long experience of farmers’ cooperative fundraising as they kept coming up with terms as “dividends on patronage”, “dividends on shares” and “demand dividends”. If all the dividends raised were pooled every year, the money that would be raised could be more than enough to contract competent coaches at cluster levels through a competitive bidding process.

As the exchange of ideas continued, it was clear that a lot of coaching support on coordination at cluster and regional levels would still be necessary to achieve the sums for this idea to work. But it was very heart-warming for me to witness cluster members voicing how much they valued the coaching services and that they would be willing to find a way to pay for the services themselves.