Mwandama Cooperative Union provides several trainings to the farmers of the primary cooperatives.
New Farming Technologies: The union has an Extension Agriculture Officer, who provides trainings like new farming technologies, soil conservations, trainings on good seeds, and afforestation.
The Union also works with other partners in training the farmers.
Mwandama Union has a big warehouse storage facility that takes 2500 metric tons of the commodity. The warehouse assists in aggregating grains from the members for storage so that they sell when prices are better at the market.
Apart from storage the Union adds value to the grains by cleaning and bagging these grains. It assists the farmers in training them on good management of the grains, fumigation, cleaning etc.
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The union has assisted in school feeding program as one way of encouraging the children to be attending the classes.
However, Mwandama couldn’t on its own to sustain the project. The Union was being assisted by the Millennium Villages Project to carry out this project. Since the time the Millennium faced out its project, many children have dropped out from school.
Mwandama Cooperative Union has a great potential closing the gap of food security if farmers can be given enough farm inputs, good trainings on new farming technologies, trainings on climate change etc.
At the moment the union keeps its grains so that it sales to the community during the lean period.
Mwandama Union is surrounded by towns like Zomba town, Blantyre city etc.
The Union markets all the commodities for the farmers. The union has partnered with buyers. One of the major buyers of Mwandama Union is World Food Programme that buy 90 percent of the Mwandama commodities.
This has helped farmers to have good prices of their crops. Apart from World Food Programme, Mwandama Union has also partnered with other buyers like Graintex, that is in poultry farming.
Other buyers include secondary schools in the southern regions, the community which relies on the union during the lean period and other local vendors.
Mwandama Union main objective is to provide access to its members farm inputs and hybrid seeds.
Though Mwandama is trying its best in providing this service, the union is facing many challenges.
Mwandama lucks financial muscle to fully support the farmers. The union relies on borrowing these farm inputs from banks.
The Union desire is to find alternative funding that will help many farmers of the area to have access to these farm inputs. This will help many community household farmers to have good food security and start selling the surplus at better prices.
Mwandama cooperative union offers school feeding to primary schools around its area.
Primary Cooperatives' products are assembled for Marketing.
We plant trees to replensh them.