Business models for Climate Smart Agriculture: preliminary findings of the OSMARE Research Project, Eastern and Southern Africa

Published on the Food and Business Knowledge Platform on 19 August 2019, a factsheet showing the preliminary results of the Organizing business models for SMAllholder REsilience (OSMARE) Programme demonstrates that:

• Farmers and their business partners realize that climatic conditions are rapidly changing. Smallholders have to continuously adapt climate smart agriculture (CSA) practices every season and that this adaptation requires a diffused ability to effectively recombine the resources at hand.
• Business models that have a purposive space for experimentation stimulate alternative ways by smallholders to create, deliver and capture value and enables their adaptation and thus resilience. Having that space for experimenting enabled the dairy farmers in the previous example to overcome a severe market crisis.
• Smallholders’ entrepreneurship, adaptation and resilience also involves navigating tensions that may arise within the communities they live in. Several farmers mentioned that in their community they live by the mantra ‘two are better than one, when one falls the one lifts up the other’. Yet, the business model arrangements may conflict with this social obligation. It is therefore crucial to reflect on who are the "winners" and "losers" within and outside business models, and how to respond to that.

• By building personal, trust-based relationships, systems-thinking and rapid prototyping workshops can actively involve smallholders and other stakeholders, and build individual and collective entrepreneurial capacity and resilience. This resulted for example in new action research to train and support experimentation, capture the learning, and subsequently assessing resilience (at farm & dairy collective level).

OSMARE aims to understand whether and how business models for Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) stimulate or stunt smallholder resilience in East and Southern Africa, focusing on the organization of four existing business models in Malawi and Zimbabwe; two on seeds and two on livestock ( i.e. dairy and goat).

It is a is a Global Challenges Programme (GCP) project which received funding in the fourth call GCP4. GCP research is carried out in consortia consisting of Southern and Northern scientific and other partners. The projects have a duration of four to five years and are aimed at enhancing the understanding of food and nutrition security in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC). In November 2017, eight transdisciplinary projects have been awarded grants in the GCP fourth call with focus on scaling up climate-smart agriculture. The consortia consist of research organizations, a public and/or private organization from an LMIC, and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

The factsheet can be downloaded here.