Sub-Saharan African ‘Food value chains’
The overall topic of food and Sub-Saharan Africa is not new. Discussing these topics could arguably be
considered as the most discussed topic of all in relation to Sub-Saharan Africa due to problems of hunger
and deprivation challenges over the years. However, Sub-Saharan Africa is growing, in economic terms
(with varying growth rates from country to country) and new opportunities and solutions are emerging to
meet new demands and solve problems. So there are potential opportunities for exploring these markets
from a business perspective.
Another significant issue in relation to Sub-Saharan Africa is the vast population growth rates. So where
there are more wealthy and middle-class citizens in Sub-Saharan Africa than ever before, there are still
many more poor people than there have ever been. The Worldbank surveyed in 1984 that Sub-Saharan
Africa consisted of 74% poor people, and 30 years later that figure had only dropped to 73%. But the
unfortunate reality is this: the 74% in 1984 equalled to nearly 200 million people, and the 73% in 2005
equalled almost 400 million people. So there are twice as many poor people now than there were 30 years
before, so the challenge of poverty, access to food, health issues in general are all significant challenges
still. The difference now though is the physical and mental institutions of many countries are improving and
economic growth is generating a forward motion, maybe mostly to the benefit of middle and upper classes,
but could provide some spill over effects on the lower classes. So there are more poor people, but overall
conditions are changing across the board.
Research into this overall topic is vast but for our purposes we still need to create context specific
knowledge, with context specific actors, to learn how commercial businesses in our home country could
access these growing markets and generate profits by solving social problems; and for this article in
particular – food related issues.
Research design
Theoretically the research approach envisioned to study the phenomenon of food value chains, is
fundamentally a case study approach, which especially Flyvbjerg (2006) has shown is a realistic way of
learning. Case studies are in their nature context specific, but as researchers deal with one case at a time a
continual awareness and expertise can be gained case by case. This Flyvbjerg explains, is essentially how
practitioners learn, and so too does research. Of course not everybody agrees as some research may not be
particularly context specific or even clearly demarcated in time or other, but for the purpose of discovering
what food value chains look like, and the processes of creating them, we expect to study them one at a
time. Again it would be very beneficial to learn of the process of creation as they happen, but we would
prefer to study the value chains that are up and running, and try and draw excerpts from the actors who
have created the value chains to see if any significant issues can be identified.
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Outline of the research into food value chains
There is an overall topic of food value chains, and the learning cycle from our institutional point of view
includes iterations over time. What this means is; there are going to be different specific research topics
that alone only provide very narrow perspectives, but combined offer a more substantial picture.
First of all we must acknowledge that value chains are significantly different in terms of what they include,
who the suppliers are, the customers, the origins, cultures etc. In other words, the study of food value
chains is not considered to be generic.
We need to focus on something, and preferably something which offers some sort of relevance and we
have chosen to look at protein consumption as a whole. The interesting aspect of protein consumption is
based on a challenging health issue in Sub-Saharan Africa: the lack of protein in local diets. Protein as a
whole is considered to be sourced primarily from meat, but meat is not readily available to low-income
populations, which are by far the largest part of Sub-Saharan Africa nations. Research into the dietary
consumption of Sub-Saharan Africans shows a worrying lack of protein:
“Both protein-energy malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies are highly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa,
especially among children and women of reproductive age. Undernutrition results in substantial increases in
overall disease burden and mortality, decreases in intellectual development and reduction in productivity
and economic development.” (N2Africa, Nutritional benefits of legume consumption 31-07-2013)
Our interest in this topic is primarily based on opportunities for Danish businesses to exploit this in some
way. Maybe Danish manufacturers of protein additives (powder or something similar) could introduce lowcost supplements, food stuffs or other, which could increase protein consumption. The challenge is as yet
very abstract and research into this topic will need to include many different perspectives:
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What is protein and are there material considerations worth considering?
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If a potential product and market could be considered – what then should be the most viable
course of action?
And as the knowledge base increases, new questions will emerge.
So to start off the investigations we must first test our assumptions about using protein supplements as a
potential market opportunity. The assumptions which are tested are fundamentally based on what we have
come to accept and believe in Denmark, and that these same beliefs and ideas are valid in the context of
Sub-Saharan Africa.
The overall research framework for this particular part of the study is:
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To create a baseline for further studies into food value chains, beginning with:
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What is protein?
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What, if anything, do we know about how it is consumed?
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How it is produced and its availability?
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Legislative considerations etc.
Method
The research for this paper is conducted almost entirely on the basis of secondary data. This secondary
data is considered sufficient in creating a base line for future studies. Sources are the Worldbank, the
World Health Organisation, the UN and any research informative for this analysis. We recognise that
studies into food challenges, dietary discussions etc. regarding Sub-Saharan Africa is by no means new –
our job is to tap into these discussions and to start forming a base line for our own perspective on food
value chains. And from these experiences we may start to form a practical approach to this knowledge,
which is to say, we expect to learn how the business of trading food in relation to Sub Saharan Africa is
enabled or constrained. And from this we expect to enhance our educational programs so that students in
Business topics can learn these issues, from which Industry can gain access to skilled labour that can help
them deal with these often difficult markets.
At some point beyond the scope of this particular paper, we will focus more attentively at a specific
geographical context (Kenya) and with specific commercial actors (Danish) in collaboration with students at
our vocational school (UCN). XX
Data collection
When studies progress beyond the secondary data collection, there are a number of different Danish
operators within food value chains worth investigating. And at some point we will expand research to
consider the many different ways to view Sub-Saharan Africa in a food value chain perspective: exporting to
Sub-Saharan Africa, importing from Sub-Saharan Africa, manufacturing in Sub-Saharan Africa and selling in
Sub-Saharan Africa, or even exporting from a country within Sub-Saharan Africa to some other market
there or even other parts of the World.
The rationale behind making such distinctions includes thoughts of crops produced for sales and
consumptions, and crops produced only for sales; e.g. coffee is a cash crop as it is not considered
sustenance in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, but only produced with the purpose of being marketed
primarily in foreign markets. In other words, there does not have to be a correlation between being able to
produce something, and that the producers also consume that which they produce.
What is protein and what considerations are there?
The purpose is not to exhaustively discuss proteins but simply to estimate the purpose of protein, what has
been done to promote protein in Sub-Saharan Africa and if there are considerations.
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Data
Components & Nutrition Facts
Yam and Cassava
In 100 grams
Yam
Cassava
Calories
Total Fat
Cholesterol
Sodium
Potassium
Total Carbohydrate
Dietary fiber
Sugar
Protein
118
0,2 g
0 mg
9 mg
816 mg
28g
4,1 g
0,5 g
1,5 g
159
0,3 g
0 mg
14 mg
271 mg
38 g
1,8 g
1,7 g
1,4 g
In 100 grams
Yam(50g)+Cassava(50g)
Calories
Total Fat
Cholesterol
Sodium
Potassium
Total Carbohydrate
Dietary fiber
Sugar
Protein
138,5
0,25 g
0 mg
11,5 mg
543,5 mg
33 g
2,95 g
1,1 g
1,45 g
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Protein



Proteins are essential nutrients for the human body ( growth and maintenance)
o muscles, bones, and the rest of your body
Proteins are made of amino acids:
o Essential amino acids
o Non-essential amino acids
o Conditional amino acids
Daily protein intake:
o Babies need about 10 grams a day.
o Teenage boys need up to 52 grams a day.
o Teenage girls need 46 grams a day.
o Adult men need about 56 grams a day.
o Adult women need about 46 grams a day (71 grams if pregnant or breastfeeding)
Prevention of sicknesses
Protein–energy malnutrition
"the cellular imbalance between the supply of nutrients and energy and the body’s demand for them to
ensure growth, maintenance, and specific functions“. It is a condition that develops when the body does
not get the right amount of the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients it needs to maintain health tissues
and organ function.
Types:



Kwashiorkor (protein malnutrition predominant)
Marasmus (deficiency in calorie intake)
Marasmic Kwashiorkor (marked protein deficiency and marked calorie insufficiency signs present,
sometimes referred to as the most severe form of malnutrition)
Facts:


According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 49% of the 10.4 million deaths occurring in
children younger than 5 years in developing countries are associated with PEM.
Protein–energy malnutrition affects children the most because they have less protein intake. The
few rare cases found in the developed world are almost entirely found in small children as a result
of fad diets, or ignorance of the nutritional needs of children, particularly in cases of milk allergy.
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Age-standardised disability-adjusted life year (DALY) rates from Protein-energy malnutrition by country (per
100,000 inhabitants).
500-600
no data
600-700
less than 100
700-800
100-200
800-900
200-300
900-1000
300-400
1000-1500
400-500
more than 1500
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Digestion
Trends towards ‘gluten-free’ products
Lactose intolerance
As we can see the most attractive markets for gluten-free products are located in South America, Asia and in Africa.
Besides that, a remarkable part of the world population suffers from lactose intolerance, which will highly affect the
selection of protein used in in our protein products.
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Findings
The data reveals that indeed protein is a significant problem in many low-income areas of the World, and in
particular Sub-Saharan Africa. The data also reveals that the lack of protein cannot immediately be replenished by
use of any sort of protein as other issues must be considered:
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Gluten intolerance (or allergies)
Lactose intolerance (or allergies)
These issues are quite significant in terms of, in the first place, to devise products and solutions that conform to
these requirements, and second, to develop a value chain that delivers the required product profitably and with no
contamination issues.
Gluten can cross-contaminate with very little effort, where lactose is more controllable. Regardless of the
technicalities of manufacturing a qualitative product, the issues of profitability becomes markedly more
questionable.
Now it has not been researched yet, but the following issues have been mentioned in and around the whole idea of
looking for business opportunities in protein supplementation:
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Lactose and/or gluten free products are significantly more expensive to produce in Europe as a deal great of
the established foodstuff production is either milk based or wheat based.
The price point of these products then is higher than regular products.
In low-income countries price points are always an issue.
There are other perspectives worth exploring further:
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Since wheat (and other gluten rich produce) are not common in Sub-Saharan Africa the idea of not importing
protein supplements makes more sense.
But this would suggest that the manufacturing should take place locally.
This though provides a host of other challenges that are not product/industry specific: grid electricity
deficiencies, irregular supply chains, poor supply chain governance and maintenance and a host of other
issues that fundamentally makes it a challenge to manufacture anything there at any sustainable level.
The issue of hygiene often creeps up in any food sector in any part of the world. However, in Sub-Saharan
Africa sanitary standards are fundamentally not at European levels.
But as a starting point, from a product perspective, there seems at least to be something worth exploring.
Plant based protein powders
There are a number of alternative protein sources still left to study and consider:
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Soy protein powder
Hemp protein powder
Pea protein
Etc.
Dealers, suppliers etc. are actors worth exploring once a partnership of commercial actors looking to do business in
protein come together.
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Business challenges
Discussing the impact the findings have on business and how businesses should organise their attempts at supplying
protein additives or supplements or similar in places of Sub-Saharan Africa suggest that the origin and nature of the
products should be manufactured with strong foci on potential allergic reactions. Manufacturing allergy friendly
products is in Europe still a costly endeavor, in part due to the relative small production scale of such product lines,
as there are still not that many customers for it.
Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa could theoretically then be interesting for manufacturers of gluten-free products etc.
as there seems to be a proportionately much larger population groups there to sell to. The earliest judgments of
pressing on towards exploiting such potential markets is that there are high sunk costs in both organising production
as well as distribution, as well as there are only immature markets in Sub-Saharan Africa for such products.
Short-term profitability seems unlikely, as research can also reveal that in places such as Sub-Saharan Africa there
are no real benefits of being ‘First Movers’; i.e. the penalties of being the first in a market is not off-set by any
potentials of being the first in the market in terms of brand loyalty and ultimately earnings (XX). Those that break
open a market then are not always the winners as they will have spent more resources on breaking into the market
than they would hope to return. Ostensibly, those that come immediately after stand a better chance of reaching
commercial success.
In Sub-Saharan Africa the challenge of businesses, and in particular those that focus on B2C, and yet more
particularly on those that focus on the bottom of the pyramid where protein deficiencies are especially rampant, are
challenged even more than those that target upper market segments (XX). Like so many other products marketed
towards the poor and disenfranchised of Sub-Saharan Africa, it very much depends on the business model more than
the product itself.
In West Africa the Danish owned dairy manufacturer FanMilk have reaped considerable commercial success for
various reasons, all of which were needed: strategic control of the supply chain, utilisation of excess capacity in
home country, eliminated contamination of the food, and ultimately a unique delivery model that allowed the
product to become available to customers that might not have the opportunity to travel any length of distance (of
which there are many in poor countries of the World). Not one single of the above-mentioned issues were in
themselves enough to secure success. All of them had to coincide for the business to turn a profit. This in turn speaks
much of how to organise a business model than it speaks of inventing products, although the product is important.
FanMilk like many other foreign owned enterprises will however quickly remind us that arriving at a functioning
model of doing business, did not take a day or two. FanMilk spent almost two decades figuring it all out.
West Africa Fisheries in Ghana is arguably a success as well, but here the processes of getting there exceeded the
expectations of what a European business operation would hope to endure. Securing permits, creating facilities that
conform to European health standards, hiring staff, training them to reach sufficient standards, hygiene etc. etc. are
just some of the issues that needed to be addressed. As most business will have to endure many varied issues in
order to exist, so too must businesses looking to build food value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Another Danish owned operation FarmMountain in Uganda, which produces coffee for export also tells a story of the
food value chain being a considerable challenge. Some of the issues are:
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The coffee delivered is not always of the required quality.
Time of delivery can also be a problem.
Coffee farmers are faced with some sustainability issues:
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o
o
o
For instance, when farmers harvest – two times a year – they deliver in bulk to the wholesaler, who
then pays in these large payments. The value of money in places like Uganda changes considerably
over the course of a year, so your 100 US Dollars worth of local currency in April may be less worth
in October.
Next there is the issue of having relative large amounts of money that you have to stretch over many
months.
If the harvest fails in any way, delivery requirements may not be met, leading to low to no income,
compounded by the problem that farmers cannot eat coffee beans to sustain them etc. etc.
In other parts of the World, where yet another Danish operator, Aurion, sources some of the company’s food stuffs
there are other challenges. The high protein grain called quinoa is produced in Bolivia by local farmers, but:
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The farmers speculate in farming, because years of experiences have told them if they do not produce one
year, the prices sky-rocket the next year – where they then produce. And even when offered a higher
average price per kilo of quinoa as calculated between high and low price years – even then farmers will not
do it. In other words, they seem to value having a year off higher than earning more money.
When the farmers do farm quinoa they have a liberal understanding of what would seem ethical, as canvas
bags of quinoa are sold by weight, and therefore supplemented with a few rocks to make it heavier.
And the list goes on.
There are no generic lessons to be learned in that each context offers some slight variation. What we can say is that
getting to know what will be needed for a food value chain to work, takes significant amounts of effort – of someone
– preferably the company itself, but not specifically always so.
Case of Mokai
This case does not fit into the discussions of fulfilling a protein deficiency problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, but does
say something about the potentials of employing students as part of the processes of marketing food and beverage
products in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In 20XX XX students went to XX as part of their internship as part of the Bachelor degree in International Sales and
Marketing at University College North, Denmark (UCN). The students were all working with the Danish company XX,
who learned that there might be unexplored opportunities for some of their existing products in East Africa. The
students were then sent to Tanzania for XX months to figure out market potentials and also tentative ideas of how to
exploit these potentials.
…
Developing Vocational Training in relation to Food Value Chains
Before returning to the findings of this article, on interesting interview with a high level officer of a Danish MultiNational Corporation gives way to some interesting considerations:
“So Mr. X, what if anything have you learned from trying to get a business going in country Z?
“First of all, I would not hire somebody like myself!”
“What do you mean by this?”
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“I am a generalist, in other words, I am able to get to terms with pretty much everything that comes my way, but I
am not a specialist. And what we should have done was to hire specialists with deep knowledge – deep enough
knowledge to be able to look beyond what they already knew.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“We did not need some specialists – we needed many of them. Too often the projects would take too long because
the involved did not have deep knowledge about the topics, and the problem is that deep knowledge takes a long
time to reach in places like country Z. So we were burning capital far beyond what we had budgeted simply because
we were taking too long to learn what was going on, on the ground.”
The company has since stopped its operations for various reasons, but primarily because the sunk costs were too
large to merit further developments.
What does this all mean?
In relation to training students so as to be able to deliver value to companies looking to do business as per the theme
of this article, then educational programs should adopt to the circumstances. Becoming a specialist in anything
requires context specific experiences with different cases and situations over time. Students then would benefit
greatly from dealing with specific contexts, over time with only slight thematic variations. Students then should
become specialists – during their studies. This of course seems quite a challenge, but at least part of the equation
seems to be solvable: students study cases, write reports and do internships, but for the most part the students do
so with no specific attention to a specific context. This we might have to!?
Students have provided the main body of desk research for this paper, and the main author of this article has been
to East Africa on numerous occasions, and has had opportunities to witness first-hand some of the issues gathered
for this article. And it is witnessing the context as primary data that makes all the difference.
Conclusion
We may as novices in the field of exploring food value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa come to understand that our
ideas are only as good as our assumptions. First of all, the idea of marketing protein enriched products or
supplements in Sub-Saharan Africa must first and foremost consider if there are any demands for such products and
also if there are special considerations. The demand for protein is generic, but the considerations of where the
protein is sourced from are not. Widespread lactose and gluten intolerances in many developing nations of the
World suggest that the challenges of supplying protein is even more difficult, as such types of products are
traditionally much more expensive to manufacture than food stuffs that do not have to consider such intolerances.
And yet, these markets might actually be turned into attractive markets for companies that already deal in such
products as there are potentially many more customers to service, which could kick start an economy of scale not
yet available in Europe.
The process of creating the business within a food supply chain requires expertise of those involved, and expertise is
difficult to come by in Sub-Saharan Africa. First of all it takes a long time to become an expert in anything in SubSaharan Africa, thus the time and resource requirements are equally profound, which in turn suggests that
companies would do well to hire experts rather than to figure things out by themselves.
The process of creating a business can be alleviated to some degree by involving students as part of creating a more
informed decision base. Students can research and visit markets as part of their education programs, in collaboration
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with businesses, so as to obtain contextual an on the ground experiences of what it will take for a business to gain a
foothold on a market in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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