Selection Ethiopia
CAMS Engineering PLC
We are a women and youth-led inclusive, equitable and sustainable grain threshing service provision for smallholder farmers. Our project engages women and youth in agricultural transformation through appropriate scale modernizing technology. Our innovative business model will use a voluntary profit-sharing scheme, enabling thresher ownership in 4 years. Every year, the target women and youth group as Threshing Service Providers (TSP)s will earn equity, an incentive to retain them to stay in our business.
The Problem
Agriculture is a key economic driver of Ethiopia’s long-term growth and food security, directly supporting 85% of the population. However, the agriculture and agri-processing sectors remain undeveloped across the value chain, including agricultural mechanization. Ancient farming methods impede the availability of grain throughout the year. This adversely affects the grain value chain, while also ensuring slow and intense human drudgery.
Additionally, a lack of access to modern mechanization also creates barriers to professional growth. As a result, many young people leave farms to look for work in urban or peri-urban areas, but often have difficulty finding meaningful, long-term, adequately paid employment. There are many unemployed college-educated woman and youth in different professional areas including engineering, agriculture, and economics where finding a decent job is extremely competitive.
The Solution
Our project introduces a new business model for creating an inclusive, equitable and sustainable mechanical threshing service provider (TSP) network. Our network aims to empower smallholder farmers who have no access to threshing services, and are threshing or shelling in a traditional way with high inefficiency and cost. The TSPs will be women and youth between the ages of 15-35. Our business model creates opportunities for job creation in thresher fabrication/assembly, operation, and maintenance. With specially designed equipment to be suitable for operation by women, eliminating hindrances from women participating as TSPs.
We aim to reduce unemployment and increase product quality and value by introducing locally assembled multi-crop threshers. We will hire a workforce of 550 women and youth to operate service provision businesses using the threshers. Furthermore, our project will create TSP entrepreneurs through a profit-sharing mechanism.
These threshers help improve Ethiopian agriculture by:
- increasing smallholder farmer productivity
- reducing post-harvest loss
- providing jobs for peri-urban youth with skills in engineering, business development, and agriculture
Our work strengthens human capacity, creates new jobs, builds industrialization, and works to improve agricultural productivity and modernity. We address challenges faced by our target group by providing tailored training leading them to self-employment as threshing service providers (TSP), maintenance technicians, regional focal personnel, and monitoring and evaluation personnel. Our project also provides fair-wage jobs as daily laborers in the farming community.
Additionality
With CFYE support, the project will be better designed, proceed more quickly, and reach more young people than it otherwise would have. It will allow us to manage the risks involved in implementing this new innovative business model. With CFYE support, the project will be designed to better allow deployment of threshers with service networks and expand CAMS supervisors (focals) already in place. CFYE funding enables the production of many more decent jobs than CAMS could accomplish by itself. It creates a large network of people who will be able to own their own TSPs in a short amount of time. This business generation will build the economy of Ethiopia while helping women and youth find financial success.
