Kenya · Uganda · Tanzania · Rwanda
Africa's food systems, built by people who trade in them.
HAGRO Trading Limited designs, delivers and evaluates smallholder value chain programmes for donors, governments and agribusinesses. We are not only advisers. We buy, aggregate and move commodities ourselves, which is why our numbers hold up when someone checks them.
Highlighted fields are placeholders. Replace each one with a verified figure before this site goes live. Every placeholder on the site is listed in the deployment notes.
The problem we work on
Most value chain advice has never met a farmer on a Tuesday.
East Africa does not lack strategies for smallholder agriculture. It lacks delivery. Studies are written by teams who fly in, model a chain they have never bought from, and leave before the first season closes. Programmes are designed around numbers nobody can trace back to a named farmer in a named county.
HAGRO was built the other way round. We started in trade in 2013, connecting rural producers in western Kenya to buyers who pay. The advisory practice grew out of that operation, not the other way around. When we write that a chain works at a given price, it is because we have moved product through it.
Capability
Six things we are hired to do
Our consultancy practice leads, and the operating divisions give it evidence. Clients can buy any one of these, or a combination that runs from diagnosis through delivery to independent measurement.
Food systems and value chain advisory
Sub sector studies, feasibility work, market systems diagnostics, business cases and investment readiness across crop, livestock, dairy and aquaculture chains.
Programme design and delivery
Component design, implementation, farmer mobilisation, aggregation models, extension delivery and last mile execution for donor and government financed programmes.
Farmer data, monitoring and evaluation
Baselines, midlines and endlines, farm level economics, service delivery model analysis, and primary data collected by teams the farmers already know.
Trade and commodities
Sourcing, aggregation, quality management and market linkage. This is the operating business that keeps the advisory practice honest.
Construction and agritech
Post harvest infrastructure, storage, water and irrigation works, and the practical technology that makes a value chain intervention physically possible.
Information services
Market intelligence, documentation and communications, including field documentary production through our media arm.
Why HAGRO
Three things a pure consultancy cannot offer you.
Advisers who have never carried inventory tend to underestimate what a chain actually costs to run. We carry it.
We are the offtaker as well as the adviser
Where a programme needs a private partner who will genuinely commit to buy, we can be that partner. That makes public private producer partnership structures workable rather than theoretical.
We already have the farmers' trust
Through our field operations and the Smallholder Farmers documentary channel, we have spent years recording real farm financial data with farmers' consent. Enumeration teams arrive as a known name, not a stranger with a clipboard.
We are local, registered and accountable here
Kenyan owned, Kenyan registered, and present in the counties where the work happens. Local presence is not a line in our proposal. It is where we live.
Who we work with
Four kinds of client, one delivery standard
Donors and funds
Multilateral and bilateral funders and foundations commissioning studies, designs, delivery and independent measurement in smallholder value chains.
Government programmes
Project management units and county governments procuring technical assistance under donor financed agriculture programmes.
International primes
Consortium leads who need a credible East African partner with real field presence, local registration and delivery capacity.
Agribusiness and finance
Processors, exporters, banks and investors who need a chain diagnosed, a supply base built, or a service delivery model costed properly.
"We tell the stories of East Africa's most surprising farmers, and we open their books."
The editorial promise behind Smallholder Farmers, the documentary channel HAGRO produces. It is also, in one sentence, how we treat evidence in every assignment we take.
Have a chain that needs diagnosing, or a programme that needs delivering?
Tell us the commodity, the county and the question. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right firm for it.