COMSIP promotes 320 legume farmers

By Wahard Betha

A local cooperative union, the Community Savings and Investment Promotion (COMSIP), says it has promoted about 320 legume farmers in the country through its Legume Enterprise and Structure Production (LESP) program, which it kick-started in 2015.

COMSIP says through LESP they have promoted the farmers through offering of loans and matching grants, marketing their produce and teaching them on how they can save their investments.

Cooperate Development and Investment Officer for COMSIP Paul Kamwendo said in the past five years the union has been promoting production of legumes including sugar beans, soya, pigeon peas, groundnuts, rice and others.

Kamwendo said as a capacity building organization promoting savings and investment among groups that do not have accounts with commercial banks, they launched the programme with the understanding that many of union members are farmers and they rely on agribusiness.

He said: “In 2013, we saw that so many groups are looking for market for agricultural products and after doing some research we saw that we could invest and save money in groups but first we were looking at what was coming out of our investment and farming activities.”

“Issues that were hindering us were about market linkages and the financial support, and for that point we introduced the programme called Legume Enterprise and Structured Production (LESP).”

“On financial support, in the first year it was 70% loan and 30% matching grant and the subsequent year it was 50% loan and 50% matching grant while third year it was 30% and 70%.”

“The fourth year, it is 100% grant because they had to graduate in the process than having the same group all the years getting the same percentage of loan and at the same time our basis is to reach many groups other than dwelling on the same group.”

In 2019, COMSIP in collaboration with Harvest Plus, an organization which is fostering and advocating for seed multiplication by fortified seeds, adopted the orange maize Vitamin-A.

Kamwendo said the adoption of Vitamin-A was ideal with the coming of government’s school feeding program which identified the crop as so nutritious and the demand increased, giving an opportunity for farmers to make more profits.

He also said the promotion of the orange maize vitamin-A in collaboration with Harvest Plus is a surplus to what the union has already been doing on legume production.

Kamwendo said through the collaboration, they managed to produce about 300 metric tons in the first year of production while this year they have produced about 400 metric tons of orange maize vitamin A.

However, he lamented lack of financial support as a bottleneck to farmers in the country to fully excel in agribusiness.
He said some farmers fail to access loans from commercial banks in fear of issues to do with collateral and other bank demands including insurance.

Kamwendo said: “Every bank is looking for a farmer that has a ready buyer with ample financial resources. So many of these farmers are subsistence farmers and they do not have such kind of a market.”

“In the legume market, some of the buyers are not coming up with such kind of platform where they offer agricultural contracts.”
“Malawi will become a food basket only if the farmers are assisted financially. You know Malawians are hard workers and in Malawi what many know that brings food or money in their basket is farming.”

“If all farmers in all groups will access agribusiness loans, we will be assured that the Malawian economy will grow because they will have the muscle to compete on the market,” he said.

He also called for mindset change for farmers to start considering farming as a business so that they remain resilient in times of changes of prices of commodities.

He said: “This time our farmers are crying that fertilizer prices have gone up but I will change that to say farming cost has gone up.”

“It means that as a business, this should result in hiking price for that commodity to make profits, prices of legumes should also go up.”

“The market should prepare that the prices have gone up not just be crying. Now you should be thinking that these materials have gone up.”

Nationwide, COMSIP has 895 groups with a membership of 55,781 of which over the years has been facilitating growth of the groups into well managed, member-driven savings and investment institutions which have fully integrated enterprise development at their core.

Generally, COMSIP collaborates with various partners including policy direction and support from Government of Malawi (GOM) and other agencies such as National Local Government Finance (NLGFC), and development partners mainly the World Bank and German Technical Cooperation (GIZ).

The collaboration with various stakeholders helps in enhancing capacity building, general project management and coordination, savings mobilization, nutrition and health, business management and financial literacy among the rural and urban poor households.