How we work
Evidence first, delivery second, and never a number we cannot trace.
A short description of our method, our standards on data, and the three structures through which we normally engage.
Method
Five steps, in this order
Frame the real question
Most terms of reference ask for a study when the client actually needs a decision. We spend the first week establishing what decision the work has to support, and we will tell you if the scope in front of us will not support it.
Go to the farm
No HAGRO deliverable is written from a desk alone. Field work is designed first and the analysis is built around it, not the reverse. Our teams enter through relationships that already exist in the counties.
Cost it like an operator
We build the enterprise budget, the service delivery cost and the working capital cycle the way a business would, because we run the same numbers on our own trade. This is where most consultancy models quietly fail.
Say what is uncertain
Every deliverable separates what we verified from what we estimated and what we could not confirm. A report that hides its own uncertainty is not a stronger report, it is a less useful one.
Hand over something usable
Deliverables are built to be used: a tracker somebody maintains, a model somebody runs, a design somebody can procure against. Not a document that gets filed.
The farmer network
Our single most valuable asset is not on the balance sheet.
It is a network of smallholder farmers across western Kenya and beyond who know HAGRO, trade with HAGRO, and have let us publish their numbers.
Since 2013 we have sourced from smallholder producers. Since the Smallholder Farmers documentary channel began, we have also sat with farmers and recorded what they earn, what they spend and what went wrong, on camera and with their consent.
That gives us three things a competitor has to buy: enumeration teams that are trusted on arrival, a body of real farm financial data rather than modelled assumptions, and a dissemination route that reaches farmers directly.
On consent and privacy. Consent to appear in a documentary is not consent to appear in a dataset. We treat these separately, we record consent for the specific use, and we handle personal data under the Kenya Data Protection Act 2019. Our approach is set out in the privacy notice.
Engagement structures
Three ways we sit in a programme
As the contracted adviser
We are engaged directly by a funder, a project management unit, a government body or a private client to answer a question or deliver a workstream. Standard consultancy terms, fixed or deliverable based pricing.
As a consortium partner
We join an international prime's bid as the named local partner, contributing field presence, national registration, enumeration capacity and delivery reach. We are used to EU, World Bank and multilateral bid formats.
As a co investing partner
Under public private producer partnership structures, HAGRO brings offtake commitment, inputs, logistics or infrastructure alongside public funds. The producer side gets de risked, and the offtake is real because we are the one buying.
Standards
What we will and will not do
We will
- Name our sources and separate verified fact from estimate
- Declare our trading interest in a chain before we advise on it
- Tell a client when the answer is that the intervention should not proceed
- Publish farmer data only with consent recorded for that use
- Say when a question falls outside our competence
We will not
- Invent or inflate a farmer number, a volume or a yield
- Advise on a procurement we intend to bid into without disclosing it
- Present a modelled figure as an observed one
- Take an assignment we do not have the field capacity to deliver
- Trade the editorial independence of our documentary work for a client message
On conflict of interest: HAGRO is both an adviser and a trader. That is a strength when it is declared early and a liability when it is discovered late. We declare it in every proposal where it could apply, and we accept exclusion from a procurement where a client judges the conflict material.
Want the long version?
Our capability statement sets out the method, the team, the compliance envelope and our procurement registrations in full.