Virtual City Ltd
Organization Details
Virtual City has spent the last 14 years tracking the movement of food in over 10 different food value chains in 4 countries. We use simple mobile tools to create efficiencies and eliminate fraud within these food value chains, by increasing transparency and visibility of all food purchases and movement transactions involving smallholder farmers. We are currently working with over 500,000 smallholder farmers in 3 countries and we have demonstrated to the over 100 aggregators
Support Needs
Impact Story
in a dairy cooperative in Kenya, we have increased their milk collected by 311%. as outrageous as this number sounds, the exodus behind the numbers is well calculated and documented:
○ Farmers who had left this co-operative to join other co-operatives in the area came back
○ The co-operative only had one round of milk collections from the farmers at 6a.m. Once farmers came back, they pushed the management of the co-operative to increase the number of rounds of collection in addition to the morning one.
○ Farmers began selling less and less of their milk to brokers in the area as they trusted that the co-operative has their best commercial interests at heart.
in a tea aggregation cooperative in Kenya & Rwanda, we gave the cooperative the ability to keep track of leaf purchases from over 50 different collection points and they realized a 13% jump in tea collected. the reasons for this were simple:
○ The field staff responsible for collection of tea from farmers used to manipulate the manual scale and this has an impact on the actual weight recorded. The digital scale we brought on board had significant impact as there was no input required on the automated scale.
○ The buying clerks would create ghost farmers who would be a natural result of the manipulation of the weights recorded.
The above 2 examples go to illustrate the need for visibility of all field operations by farmers and without trust in the value chain, all other efforts are futile. We have noted an increase in the investment that farmers are making in agriculture especially with the aggregators we are working with.
