This report is an appraisal of a methodological approach conceptualized and commissioned by GAIN and designed by Euromonitor to assess the informal dairy market in Ethiopia using formal market approaches. This work was conducted in 2019 with support from Wageningen University under the Agriculture 4 Nutrition and Health Program.
This report presents the findings from an assessment of 163 policy measures by national governments to support micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in nine low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) between March 2020 and March 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Poor people in the global South eat diets with few nutrient-dense foods, putting children and adults alike at risk of malnutrition. Strategies to improve their diets will look different depending on whether current access to such foods is mostly via home production or via purchase and on whether poor families actually want to consume more of specific nutrient-dense food groups.
GAIN seeks to understand and tackle barriers faced by small enterprises working to boost availability, affordability, desirability, and convenience of nutritious foods like milk, especially for people on low-incomes and population sub-groups who stand to benefit from greater consumption of nutrient-dense foods, such as children.
Supporting small enterprises in the food system is central to improving access to safe and nutritious foods in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) - and therefore to improving nutrition. However, the ways in which such enterprises are supported can have important implications for achieving other social goals, such as gender equity and women’s empowerment.
In low-income countries, poor dietary diversity is driven in large part by the low availability and affordability of nutritious foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products and other animal sourced foods. In a recent assessment, GAIN determined that small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), or small and mighty enterprises as GAIN likes to call them, produce, process or sell up to 70% of nutritious food sold in low-income markets in Africa.
Fighting malnutrition in all its forms is one of the major challenges of the 21st century. Addressing it will require an agricultural transformation. Within Africa, this must include a focus on small and medium-size farms, which provide about 80% of total calories in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as other small actors along the value chain.
Through the MNF, GAIN has supported Tarakwo Dairies – an enterprise based in Kenya's Rift Valley – to scale up their supply of safe and affordable milk. Tarakwo's distribution model uses automated milk dispensing machines, or milk ATMs, which help to improve milk availability and safety, while maintaining affordable prices for resource-constrained consumers.
GAIN works on supply and demand, as well as on changing incentives, rules and regulations to encourage production and consumption of nutritious and safe foods. We seek to understand and tackle barriers faced by small enterprises working to boost availability, affordability, desirability, and convenience of nutritious foods like eggs, especially for people on low-incomes.
This factsheet highlights the vastly different levels of egg supply seen across African regions, selected African countries, and selected high-income countries. It discusses why eggs remain scarce and expensive in many low-income settings, including across much of Western, Eastern, and Middle Africa.
