About

The Innovative Beef Value Chain Development Schemes in Southern Africa is a 3-year project funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

The project will facilitate delivery of fattened smallholders’ cattle to slaughterhouses, to quality and logistic specifications.

Facilitated access to finance provides a start-up package for fattening of cattle on irrigated fodder, crop by-products and residues, and on available pastures. Traders’ purchase of a batch of cattle, and their placement with a contracted smallholder fattening household, is to be facilitated by a loan repayable after 6 months, upon slaughterhouse-contracted sale of the fattened cattle.

The approach taken features 3 phases, addressed by overlapping project components:
1. Capacity and institution-building that connects value chain actors, equips them for objective measurement of quality attributes, and connects them with ways and means of market entry.
2. A proof-of-concept of a value chain finance product entailing design, introduction and appropriate monitoring;
3. A scaling-up phase focused on communication and knowledge management.

There are three key target groups:

1. Smallholders, either facing grazing constraints in dry or remote locations (graziers);
2. Smallholders with access to fodder/feed who are located in irrigated areas but do not capital for livestock purchase (potential fatteners), and
3. Rural traders, and those developing small enterprises for rural economic development.

The project’s goal is to improve and make sustainable smallholder livelihoods from cattle production and marketing. Specifically, project objectives are to:

1. Provide smallholders with a viable cattle value addition mechanism that is coordinated with market requirements;
2. Design and demonstrate effective financial instruments and suitable products for enabling smallholder value addition in cattle systems;
3. Generate and disseminate knowledge, and encourage its uptake, throughout the Southern African region.

As a result of the project, changed behavior and practices in the beef value chain are anticipated:

1. Commercial practice by smallholder cattle producers and fatteners, using objective measures of quality and animal performance;
2. Private financiers’ advancing working capital to value chain participants that contract and deal with smallholder value addition in cattle;
3. Knowledge of how to mobilise whole-chain value addition in smallholder cattle systems is widespread in the region, along with knowledge of the key determining factors that make it locally applicable.