DELIVER Nigeria
DEcent LIVelihoods for small scale producers delivered through Economic & Resilient food systems in Nigeria
Project Summary
DELIVER Nigeria is a transformative three-year project (July 2024 - June 2027) designed to enhance the livelihoods of smallholder vegetable farmers in Kaduna and Kano states. This initiative, led by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) in partnership with East-West Seed Knowledge Transfer Foundation (EWS-KT) and Wageningen University and Research (WUR), addresses key challenges such as low yields, limited market access, high postharvest losses, and inadequate finance. The project will:
- Build capacity of farmers in vegetable production and marketing.
- Enhance climate resilience and reduce postharvest losses.
- Strengthen sector professionals' expertise.
- Foster market connections and improve access to finance.
- Promote vegetable consumption.
PROJECT GOAL
- Enhancing Livelihoods: Empower smallholder farmers, with a focus on youth and women, to increase income and improve livelihoods.
- Promoting Healthier Diets: Encourage the consumption of a variety of vegetables to foster healthier dietary habits within the community.
Key Outcomes
Immediate Outcomes:
- Smallholder farmers are engaged in diverse vegetable production as a means of generating income.
- Consumers show increased interest in purchasing new vegetable varieties.
- Improved vegetable yields among smallholder farmers, especially youth and women.
- Better storage and safety of vegetables, reducing post-harvest losses.
- Enhanced access to finance, allowing farmers to scale up their businesses.
Intermediate Outcomes:
- Year-round production of diverse vegetables for consumption and income generation.
- Availability of a wider variety of affordable vegetables for consumers.
- Safe, quality vegetables reach markets.
- Improved financial access for farmers to expand their operations.
Ultimate Outcomes:
- Increased consumption of diverse, fresh, and preserved vegetables.
- A more competitive input and output markets developed to enhance affordability and availability of vegetables.
- Higher incomes for smallholder farmers, enabling business growth.
Empowering Future Generations
With a goal of involving 50% youth and 30% women among key farmers, DELIVER Nigeria will harness the drive and innovation of these groups. The project aims to train 25,000 new smallholder farmers over three years, resulting in substantial improvements in vegetable yields, market access, and income generation.
Key Activities
- Organize community events to promote the production and consumption of vegetables while simultaneously launching campaigns in terminal markets to encourage the purchase of diverse varieties of vegetables.
- Conduct market surveys and track prices to better understand consumer preferences and market trends.
- Build the capacity of farmers on vegetable production techniques, Good Agronomic Practices (GAP), and sustainable irrigation solutions (including climate-smart practices).
- Build the capacity of agri-input dealers to effectively support farmers.
- Build capacity of smallholder farmers on best pre-and post-harvest practices and technologies to improve efficiencies, food safety, and reduce loss and waste.
- Build the capacity of sector professionals on crop agronomy, safe handling & storage of chemicals & fertilizers, as well as agro-blending learning trajectories.
- Build the capacity of farmers on financial planning and business management (micro-enterprise, agribusiness investment, financial literacy, record keeping, business models, etc.).
- Support smallholder farmers to establish financial inclusion platforms like Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) to increase savings.
- Facilitate linkages between farmers and microfinance institutions, including those led by the government and other entities.
- Establish 1,000 demonstration plots to showcase advanced agricultural techniques.
- Enhance business and market planning skills for 25,000 previously trained farmers.
Publications and Resources
Consume diverse vegetables for improved nutrition
To boost growth, development and future wellbeing, a range of diverse fruits and vegetables should form part of all our regular meals. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables can help lower blood pressure, reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases, such as heart disease and stroke, prevent some types of cancer, and lower the risk of eye and digestive problems. Non-starchy vegetables and fruits, like apples, pears and green leafy vegetables may even promote weight loss.
Reaching Lower-Income Consumers with Nutritious Foods: Distribution Hubs, Direct Sales, and Supporting Distributors and Retailers
Serving the needs of lower-income consumers requires getting food products to where they are—which often includes remote rural areas as well as underserved urban neighbourhoods. This makes distribution a key, but also costly, aspect of the business model. Using a ‘hub’ model, in which aspects of distribution are grouped together instead of done separately, can improve efficiency and cost-sharing, reducing costs overall.
Billions worldwide consume inadequate levels of micronutrients critical to human health
More than half of the global population consumes inadequate levels of several micronutrients essential to health, including calcium, iron, and vitamins C and E, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). It is the first study to provide global estimates of inadequate consumption of 15 micronutrients critical to human health.
Africa Food Systems Forum
Africa’s Food Systems Forum, formerly AGRF, is the world’s premier forum for African agriculture and food systems, bringing together stakeholders to take practical actions and share lessons that will move African food systems forward. Africa Food Systems Forum is designed to energise political will and advance the policies, programs, and investments required to achieve an inclusive and sustainable food systems transformation.
Leveraging GAIN’s Human-Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit to Boost the Nutrition Impacts of Social Protection
Improving the nutrition impacts of social protection requires targeted improvements to programme designs. GAIN believes that good social protection design involves meaningfully leveraging vulnerable beneficiaries’ voices. Doing so can help administrators better understand how to overcome constraints and address beneficiaries’ specific nutritional needs. Beneficiaries have the advantage of proximity to the key issues: they understand their specific constraints and challenges better than any other system actors. While the need to incorporate beneficiaries’ perspectives, and the value of doing so, is well accepted by social protection administrators, they often face substantial hurdles to doing so in practice: logistical constraints, language barriers, differing value systems, power dynamics, and other factors make meaningful engagement with beneficiaries a significant challenge. GAIN has set out to identify ways to support administrators to overcome these constraints, particularly through human-centered design (HCD).Human-Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit
Boosting the Nutrition Impacts of Social Protection
Human-Centered Design (HCD) can help social protection administrators better design for beneficiaries’ nutritional needs. HCD is a set of approaches, methods, and mindsets that can be used to develop innovative solutions by placing the end-user firmly at the core of the design process. Rooted in empathy for the user’s experience, HCD makes space for creative exploration of new ideas and iterative testing and improvement of potential solutions based on users’ input. In social protection contexts, HCD can amplify the voices of the beneficiaries in design processes, and give administrators robust insight into the solutions that can be most effective for reaching their nutrition objectives.
GAIN has developed an HCD Toolkit that offers governments and other system actors a consolidated set of resources to support the effective adoption and mainstreaming of HCD in social protection systems. The Toolkit can be used in design processes to overcome the traditional obstacles that actors face in engaging beneficiaries, enabling more meaningful and productive integration of their perspectives in social protection design processes. The Toolkit offers administrators complete, context-adaptable guidance for integrating HCD into their design processes in the form of three complementary resources:
- An HCD ‘Toolbox’ consisting of 21 distinct, customisable tools spread across four process phases: Plan, Listen, Ideate and Test
- A selection of pre-defined design ‘Journeys’, based on the users’ unique objectives, that provide a blueprint for designing their HCD process and selecting the tools relevant to their context
- A comprehensive Facilitator Manual and Context Adaptability Guide that offers detailed insight into HCD process implementation and guidance for tailoring the tools to meet users’ specific needs
Contact us
Anthony Wenndt
Technical Officer
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