Eastern Cape farmer Palesa Sotshongaye saved her NSFAS stipend for three years, started with spinach, cabbage and chickens, and now supplies schools and two supermarket chains in Qumbu.
At an FNB panel in KwaZulu-Natal, Kwanalu reported financial literacy among trained entrepreneurs rising from 25% to 58%, and a livestock farmer told how weaner deliveries paid for his farm.
CropsFAO marked the first International Coffee Day, designated by the UN General Assembly in March, pointing to the up to 25 million farmers, mostly smallholders, who grow a crop traded at more than $34 billion a year.
On International Coffee Day, FAO describes how washing stations in Rwanda and a reformed cooperative in Kenya's Baringo County are raising the quality of smallholder coffee and the earnings that come with it.
CropsAbout 25 million households, most of them smallholders in developing countries, grow around 80 per cent of the world's coffee; the value chain from picking the cherries to green coffee, export and roasting.
OpinionSeriti Institute's farm programme lead says the hub near Durban trained 697 people and 171 farmers, but its real test is what farmers, cooperatives and markets can keep going once the partners leave.
The Jaipur company, whose machines cost Rs 10,000 to Rs 1 lakh, will expand manufacturing, move into southern India and develop power weeders and battery sprayers with IoT features.
AgrotechVenture firm Omnivore's 2026 impact reports say its agrifood start-ups have reached 20.81 million smallholders and 61,711 rural small businesses, generating $5.64 billion in value for farmers.
AgribusinessA University of the Free State team surveyed 132 small-scale farming households in two former homelands and found labour, infrastructure and aspirations limit farming more than land does.
CropsProfessor Paul Teng of Singapore's ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute says ASEAN has a regenerative agriculture framework but no system that brings crop loss, insurance and finance together for its 100 million farmers.
AgribusinessThe Nigeria AgriConnect Compact aims to mobilise about $5 billion over five years to lift smallholder productivity, targeting food security for nearly three million people and 2.56 million jobs by 2031.
OrganicIn Whole Earth Farming, Hugh Locke proposes helping 240 million smallholder families adopt regenerative agriculture and agroforestry, citing yield gains of about 40 percent among members of his Haiti farmers' alliance.
The framework, signed at UNGA81, moves the two lenders from project-by-project deals to joint investment in the first mile of food systems.
