Agriculture 3 Mar 2023

African Marmalade

See why OneFarm Share became the gamechanger solution for the challenges that smallholder farmers such as African Marmalade face.

The context

Siphiwe Sithole wasn’t always a farmer, but she always wanted to be one. After years in a corporate career, she decided to shift gears to follow her passion and founded African Marmalade, a successful organic farming enterprise that supplies indigenous African crops.

Focusing on African heritage food, her produce provides access to indigenous food species from across the continent so that no matter where people come from, they can enjoy food that makes them feel at home.
Concerned with the lack of indigenous African food provision and that we shouldn’t forget about our ‘own food’, she started championing indigenous produce, striving not only to protect indigenous crops and the ‘way we grow and eat’ but also to empower other farmers to do the same.

IMAGE GALLERY

The challenge

Across South Africa, being remotely located and having a lack of market access put smallholder farmers at a disadvantage, but these and other challenges were compounded by the COVID-19 lockdown, when hospitality industries shut down and many farmers were stuck with excess produce that they didn’t know what to do with and would face substantial financial losses.

The solution

During lockdown, Standard Bank stepped in with the OneFarm Share programme, which started as a digital platform that connects excess fresh produce from food producers to food requests to address food security, but also to reduce the environmental impact of food waste.

Since then, the programme has grown into something much bigger: a fast track for smallholder farmers to become commercially viable. The OneFarm Share programme gave smallholder farmers, such as Siphiwe, improved market access, transparent market pricing and fair payment terms. By listing the pricing and weight amounts, as well as providing collection and transport, smallholder farmers were able to sell their produce to a wider market at a better price, regardless of location restrictions.

The outcome

OneFarm Share has uplifted hundreds of smallholder farmers and built a foundation for greater future food security, as well as enabling Siphiwe to help other farmers in her community. She became an aggregator for farmers around her and harnessed their collective capabilities to create a network of suppliers.

In that way, families could combine their production efforts and meet the required tonnage amounts together so that everyone could benefit from the opportunity and partake in the greater collective financial impact.

To date, OneFarm Share has processed thousands of tonnes of fresh produce, contributed to millions of meals and assisted hundreds of smallholder farmers (94 of them female) with enterprise development.
To find out more about OneFarm Share, visit bit.ly/OneFarmShare

"Be inspired to do something that is going to be wonderful, that’s going to be good for our country and our continent.”

Siphiwe Sithole

“We want to make this farm the cradle of African crops."