Thinking of value addition? Expert shares tips

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Having gone through all the preliminaries—preparing the land, planting or rearing animals—to harvesting, many farmers are fraught with anxiety, wondering what to do beyond selling raw materials.

Some have even heard about value addition and aspire to do it, but the question of how to go about it lingers.

Prof. Ivan Mukisa Muzira at Makerere University’s School of Food Technology, Nutrition and Bioengineering shares the following nuggets that will help farmers considering value addition for their raw materials:

1. Innovation is key. The innovator (farmer) has to think about the consumer and the market, and wonder: what is lacking? What is the gap? What products are people taking? Are they healthy?
   
   
2. What are the market trends, including foreign markets? How are they changing? Sometimes, it could be packaging in smaller containers. If you have your ear to the ground on what is happening on the international scene, you can also think quickly of how to innovate and drive trends this side.
   
   
3. Look at the processes, say production, and ask yourself, “Is this efficient? Are there losses? Is there waste that could be converted into useful products?” You look at the processes and examine it and say: “Is this efficient enough? Where can I improve?”
   
   

This is because innovation sometimes is about making improvements or taking advantage of something that you could be wasting and converting it into something from which you can make money. Or understanding people’s problems and saying, “How do I solve this problem?