The East African horticulture sector has untapped potential due to various constraints and challenges along the value chain. The Innovation Lab for Horticulture (ILH) hosted by University of California, Davis, with funding from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Feed the Future initiative, seeks to address these challenges and enhance horticultural production in the East Africa region. This will be achieved through the Horticulture Collaborative Project in East Africa, a 3.5-year initiative aimed at improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in East Africa.
The globally supported but locally led project is being implemented by the Horticulture Innovation Lab in partnership with the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED) in Kenya and Uganda.
The goal of this regionally led initiatives is to increase productivity, profitability, and consumption of horticultural produce in the rural areas. This will be achieved through:
Ultimately, the regionally based initiative seeks to empower small-scale women farmers in rural areas to earn more income while better nourishing their families. This is expected to help them to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Horticulture East Africa Region is coordinating the implementation of four projects in the region. Three of the projects are focusing on the research priorities identified during the 2022 regional workshop, which involved different actors in the horticulture sector. The first priority is to address pre- and post-harvest management to reduce food waste and losses in vegetables. The second priority is to improve the marketing of and access to vegetables in the East Africa region, through the empowerment of rural women smallholder women farmers growing vegetables on a small-scale level. Each of these projects was specifically designed to unlock access to vegetables for women smallholder farmers.
