Empowering smallholder farmers through value addition to agricultural produce

June 2022, Bhutan - Every day, smallholder women farmers around the world contribute to the wellbeing of their communities.

32-year-old Chimi Pem from Bjabchhog village in Chhukha, Bhutan is the chairperson of the Bjabchhog Women’s Group. The group received an SDF-funded training on value addition and enterprise development. Chimi says that their agricutural products were not fetching the right price. The markets are far, resulting in higher transportation loss. This is why the value addition and agri-enterprise development training was much needed especially for these rural women groups as they can increase their income by adding value to their fruits and vegetables through processing and packaging them into pickles and noodles respectively, and promoting them at the nearest markets.

Chimi, who is leading 14 women farmers, says that value added agriculture provides a unique opportunity for women’s empowerment. The 14 young women farmers provide a platform for themselves to interact and share information on innovation, production, value addition and sustainable farming methods and markets. Empowering women and families through value addition to agricultural produce “The training on value addition, food hygiene, bookkeeping, pricing, packaging and branding has helped enhance our family and group income. We now provide value addition to our farm produce and then sell them. It has increased the value and prices of our products by many folds, decreased the losses and generated employment opportunities for young women,” she said.

This training was conducted under the SDF-funded project - “Livelihood enhancement of small farmers in SAARC region through small scale agro-business focusing on value chain development”. 

In Bhutan, the project is implemented in Bjachho gewog (administrative division composing a group of villages) in Chhukha and Yoedseltse gewog in Samtse. SDF has committed a grant of over US$ 191,334 to Bhutan for this project, of which US$ 150,191 has been disbursed so far. Production and value addition equipment, bought with SDF support, will soon be installed inside the recently built processing shed to enhance production.

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