Course 1: Value Addition

Value addition

Duration: 10days Cost: $600

Background

Justification

 Although many farmers put a lot of time and effort in their crops and livestock, they often obtain little from them when it comes to the market. For a long time, local farmers have continued to have few options for handling agricultural produce. Most foods have been eaten fresh and any leftovers immediately thrown away and there hasn’t been any urgency before to consume food in an efficient manner, let alone preserve it. Adding value to farm produce is a smart move for several reasons—it’s not just about making products more attractive, but about unlocking greater benefits for farmers, consumers, and the economy.

General aim of the Course

To build the capacity of those in agro-related enterprises to enhance their utilization of profits from agricultural produce as well as the competitiveness and profitability of value added products for smallholder famers and small scale business people.

Course Objectives

The specific objectives of the course are to:

  1. Create awareness of opportunities that the value addition offers.
  2. Help you develop skills and knowledge in post-harvest handling
  3. Help you use available technologies to add value to agricultural products available to you in order to increase their market price
  4. Help you gain skills and knowledge in product design and development
  5. Help you develop ability to do appropriate handling, packaging, labelling and storage of processed products
  6. Have the shelf life extended and quality of the products improved
  7. Enable you to cost your products appropriately

Training Methodology

Besides lectures, the course will also include practical sessions, discussions, problem solving, case studies, exercises and demonstrations on various aspects of the course. Field visits to relevant sites will be carried out to help participants experience first-hand, the principles they have met in class. Resource persons/ trainees will set exercises relevant to their topics and select guest speakers who will enrich the course content. Generally, the course will be carried out in such a way that participants can relate information that they meet in class to their own experiences with other business people or customers.

Resource Persons

Resource persons for this course are sourced from our collaborating institutions in the region: universities, institutes of business and management, polytechnics as well as business schools, Non-governmental organizations and so on.

Training Cost/Scholarship and Acccomodation

The full cost of the training course is USD 600 (Ksh. 78,000) to cater for course facilitation / training fees, full board accommodation, meals and field trips, training   resource materials, stationery and other training supplies; certificates and cost of training venue. The training cost does not cover medical insurance and other personal expenses in course of the training.

All Participants will be accommodated within AICAD Hostels at JKUAT. There is limited accommodation and participants are requested not to come with dependants.

Course Modules

  • 01

    Post Harvest Handling

    The module will deal with crop harvesting, transport, storage; it will also deal with problems and their causes at each stage. Appropriate ways of reducing harvest losses will be discussed. Without proper farm produce handling, products from them cannot be of high quality.

  • 02

    Introduction to Value Addition

    This module is the foundation of the rest of the modules. It will answer the question; what is Value Addition?

  • 03

    Cereals/Tubers

    This module will cover aspects such as semi processing, enriching, milling, baking and baked products, among others.

  • 04

    Fruits and Vegetables

    This module covers handling and of fruits and vegetables produces, quality, packaging and storage.

  • 05

    Milk and Milk Products

    In this module, participants will also be able to learn the ways in which milk and milk products get contaminated, and how to avoid or reduce the problems.

  • 06

    Meat/Oil/Honey

    In this module, participants will cover production, handling and processing of various products among related other aspects.

  • 07

    Quality Control

    This is a wrap-up module, which will bring together all the aspects of quality and quality control that have been discussed in the various modules. In addition, the module will deal with specific laws regarding laws on quality and the reasons for them. This module will also discuss consumer rights and protection.

  • 08

    Costing and Marketing

    Here, participants will understand the concepts of costing and marketing, apply the idea to their particular business and create economical prices for their products.

  • 09

    Field Trips

    Ideally, field trips will be planned for and discussions and questions used to draw out important points and experiences.

  • 10

    Action Planning

    In this module, each participant will be guided to come up with a plan that uses the skills and knowledge from the course to improve or change a specific area of their business. That plan must be carried out within a specific time, such as 6 months or 1 year. The participant must also identify the resources (finance, human, time e.t.c) that are required to realize activities in the plan.

For more information on the training course please contact:

AICAD , Director Training and Extension
Africa Institute for Capacity Development
P.O. Box 46179 – 00100 GPO, Nairobi, Kenya
Email: wakhu@aicad.or.ke or te@aicad.or.ke
Tel: +254 726 610 402 or 0733523014