Since two and a half years, Rakiatou Gazibo has been Agri-Hub Coordinator in Niger. She also manages the sustainable livelihood programme of Oxfam Novib, the Agri-Hub’s lead organisation. In her work, she tries to bring parties closer together, to help address the challenges with food security, leadership and the onion value chain.

Could you tell us more about the Agri-Hub and the APEA programme?
Agri-Hub Niger is about helping to create sustainable agricultural production systems related to the right combination of all the relevant actors. It also is about enabling organised producers to develop their rural enterprises within the context of poverty reduction and food security.

A large part of our activities are in the Programme d’Accompagnement à la Promotion de l’Entrepreneuriat Agricole au Niger (APEA-Niger). This programme brings together players from various backgrounds to solve issues through action research in seed systems, livestock and dairy systems, onion marketing and land tenure, with a strong focus on learning and capitalisation.

We closely cooperate with the producer organisations that are in the APEA programme: Mooriben, FCMN Niya, FUCOPRI, AREN, GAJEL and CAPAN, so that they can learn together, share expertise and experience - and then share this experience with other actors in the agricultural sector at national level. Not just for implementing actions: it is about promoting rural entrepreneurship and fostering the entrepreneurial spirit. How to promote food security, how to bring innovation, and how to help producers to become real entrepreneurs?

What are the challenges that you meet with?
The challenge sometimes is to bring people together. You know, in Niger, there are big organisations and each organisation has its own leadership. And the moment you bring them together, they start a fight to have more space for their own organisation.

It was one of the challenges initially, but now I think things are very good. The partners have come to understand the added value they can have when they are working together. They have begun to support each other to have more joint action, opportunities and visibility in Niger. In consequence, they can have more impact in terms of voice in the country, in terms of voice with the government, in terms of voice in each of the agricultural issues. I think things have really changed because of the Agri-Hub.

I heard that there currently are some serious issues in the onion value chain; the same value chain that the Agri-Hub partners have promoted for years.
It is a sad story, because onion is a major value chain in Niger. Wageningen University has carried out a research in 2009, to see what the big challenges are and how we can address them. In addition, Agriterra and their partner De Groot & Slot have successfully been working on improving the onion seed sector for years. Niger is a poor country, you know, so our biggest challenge is the food security. And onion is one of the biggest business crops that producers can invest in. They raise profit from onions to invest in their cereal (food crop) harvest.

Last year, the onion harvest was very good and there was a lot of profit in it for the farmers. However, this year everyone invested in onions. Also, the crises in Libya and Mali made refugees come back to Niger and these have started growing onions as well. Unfortunately, now there are so many onions that it has led market prices to fall steeply. I did an assessment in May on the onion value chain and it was really a pity. If farmers take their onions and bring them to the market, they lose out because the prices are lower than cost price. So they prefer to let the onions in the field to feed their cows! At the same time, a food crisis is not far off.

This kind of situation requires the attention of a big network like the Agri-Hub, to see how we can avoid such a situation. How we can invest in other crops or make the onion producers more resilient to this kind of situation? We need to figure it out together.

Do you want to participate in the discussion? Check out the Agri-Hub Niger platform on http://apf-niger.ning.com.