Microfranchising

Through CARE’s education and training of dairy farmers in the importance of animal health and nutrition, demand has been created in the project region for improved feed, fodder, concentrates, and medicines as well as animal healthcare services and artificial insemination services. The local market has begun to respond to this need on its own, and when the CARE team conducted a rapid assessment in 2009, it identified 178 small input shops and animal health service centers that were operating in the CARE project area. In some cases, farmer groups had pooled their savings and created a community feed shop, and in others, CARE-trained livestock health workers had established their own medicine and feed shops and were offering animal health services as well. A variety of shops with various types of ownership and product and service offerings were identified. The emergence and rapid growth of these small shops attested to the demand for dairy inputs and services in rural areas because of an inefficient and unstructured rural retail distribution network. However, these input and service shops varied widely in terms of standards, offerings, quality, training levels of their owners, and procurement processes for feeds and medicines. In order for smallholder dairy farmers to benefit from having access to much needed quality inputs and services at affordable prices, CARE decided to help strengthen this grassroots market for inputs by organizing them into a network of microfranchised agricultural input shops.