Effective and efficient marketing systems are vital for sustainable agricultural production. An organised marketing and effective production incentives go a long way in ensuring sustainable production. Recent history tells of various degrees of mismatch of farmers’ expectations and prices being offered at various levels of agricultural products. The biggest challenge faced in the management of marketing systems is the fact that the process involves dealing with large numbers of small scale producers, scattered in varied locations with poor road, storage and transport infrastructure. In response to the multiplicity of producers, there is need to facilitate and support organised marketing systems; in face of the market liberalization and privatization policy trends. Of similar importance is to ensure that the various commodities produced get value addition in terms of processing, packaging and branding. The course is intended to offer a broad understanding of issues affecting commodity value chains and being able to make informed decisions for agricultural marketing.
- Lecturer: Kalibwani Rebecca
The course is intended to groom and mentor students on the innovative approaches in rural development processes, it introduces concepts of of innovations. It defines innovations as doing things differently, it could be understood to mean: new gadgets, tools, machinery, equipmet among others. It is generally a philosophy that if there is a way of doing something, there is always better ways of doing the same, but more effectively, efficiently, more cost effectively.
The concept of innovations is not new, but long standing emanating from research. Research in the National Research Systems (NARS). Innovations are the results of research such as the better seed, bter equipment, better tools among others.
The course is delivered in a series of weekly lectures to cover the entire 15 weeks of lectures and is compiled into a MADULE which is a publication of all materials to be covered in the course.