infoDEV seek Agribusiness incubation supporters

August 17, 2010 at 11:10 am | Posted in AgriTech, AIN, Business Support, Economic Development, incubation, incubator, networking, Tools | Leave a comment
Tags: Africa, conference, facilitation, incubator, international, networking, support

 

infoDev has partnered with the Government of Finland and Nokia to develop and implement a Programme “Creating Sustainable Businesses in the Knowledge Economy”.   This Programme includes an Agribusiness Component, a summary of which has been captured below for your information. 

In order to kick off the Agribusiness Component,  infoDev is planning a workshop to be held in Kampala, Uganda, from 3 – 6 October 2010 to which African Incubators focusing on agriculture/agribusiness may be invited.  Discussions during the workshop will focus on: 

Opportunities/barriers to agribusiness SME development in your country 

The challenges you face as an agribusiness incubator 

In addition, a training programme for agribusiness incubation will be piloted in February 2011 and to which agribusiness incubators may be invited. 

The purpose of this email is to ask for your assistance in identifying African incubators that focus on agribusinesses.  This could be your incubator, or you may be aware of other incubators, not necessarily yet members of AIN, who would benefit from the proposed infoDev activities as described above. 

Please would you, per return email,  forward directly to Jill the contact details of relevant incubators that fit the category as described above. 

Many thanks and with best wishes 

Jill Sawers
Innovation and Business Incubation Consultant to infoDev
email: jsawers@worldbank.org
www.infodev.org 

Non Incubated v Incubated Agribusiness

 

Summary of Agribusiness Component of “Creating Sustainable Businesses in the Knowledge Economy” Programme 

The  agribusiness component of the “Creating Sustainable Businesses in the Knowledge Economy”   Program aims to contribute towards achieving three development objectives: 

Increasing sustainable income generating opportunities 

Increasing agricultural productivity and competitiveness 

Increasing the proportion of the price paid by end-consumer that is retained by developing countries for products they produce, for instance by increasing market access and efficiencies along the value chain and expanding local value added agro-processing. 

The agribusiness program is focused on enabling innovative agribusiness entrepreneurs that: 

Provide inputs to primary producers in the form of goods and services; 

Add value to primary products (i.e. agro-processors) and play a “catalytic” role in terms of enhancing efficiency, quality and market access across the value chain. 

In line with infoDev’s mission to help developing countries harness innovation and ICT for sustainable development, the program will include an emphasis on enabling access to and productive use of technologies that are available locally, in the region and internationally. 

The Programme aims to: 

Facilitate a south-south, peer-to-peer agribusiness incubation working group 

Assess global good practices in agribusiness incubation 

Develop a training module on agribusiness incubation 

Develop a business incubation model for African agribusiness and adapt the business model to four countries ( Mozambique, Tanzania and two additional African countries. 

Explore the potential to include agribusiness incubation in business incubation activities in Asia and ECA particularly in Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam. 

These activities will be supported by the development of “sourcebooks” on ICT and Agriculture and Agricultural Innovation Systems respectively . The agribusiness program will also be linked to the SME Internationalization program, which seeks to leverage infoDev’s business incubation network to facilitate international market access for innovative SME’s, and to the regional m-apps labs, which seek to cultivate innovative mobile applications entrepreneurs.  In the future, infoDev will also explore linkages between its new work in clean technologies and agribusiness.