INTEGRATED RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: ENHANCING SMALLHOLDER FARMERS’ INCOME THROUGH COLLECTIVE MARKETING
By Noel Chatepa
The improvement of smallholder farmers’ income is one of the goals of the Integrated Rural Development Project being carried out by CADECOM Karonga Diocese in Chitipa with funding from Misereor. To this end, a group marketing intervention is one of the interventions being carried out in which farmer clubs are encouraged to assemble their produce and sell it collectively.
In line with this, the Chitete Producer and Marketing Cooperative Society Limited was formed by the union of six farmer clubs from the Adam 1 and Chawa Village Development Committees in Kameme, Chitipa, under the direction of CADECOM Karonga Diocese.
“We received training in seed multiplication in 2021 along with seeds such as maize, soya bean, and sunflower from CADECOM Karonga Diocese. In the same year, we also received orientations in finance, record keeping, cooperative management, and warehouse management” says Thomas Kanyika who is a committee member for Chitete Cooperative.
Margaret Chizimbi, a member of the marketing committee for Chitete cooperative, echoes this by stating that “members from different farmer clubs in the Integrated Rural Development project were trained and assisted in setting up different sub-committees responsible for things like marketing, loans, financing, aggregation, and production.”
The cooperative started sourcing for capital to build a warehouse and in 2022 they opened a bank account and CADECOM Karonga Diocese provided 70 percent of the finance for the warehouse construction, with the cooperative contributing the remaining 30 percent in cash and kind.
The Chitete cooperative, which was founded in 2020 as a joint marketing group by the two Village Development Committees of Adam 1 and Chawa, has 144 members and trades in commodities such groundnuts, sunflowers, and soya bean.