Farming Family Development
It is estimated over 80% of the population of PNG live in rural areas where agriculture plays a critical role in their lives, both for food consumption and earning an income. Farming practices have been characterised by subsistence gardening for generations with small amounts of cash earned from crops such as cocoa and coffee. Most farming families aspire to a more income and higher standards of living but remain unsure about how to achieve that goal. The PNGAC business model supports families to transition from subsistence gardening to running a small, profitable business.
AgBook Farming Family Development Roadmap
AgBook is a training and advisory services company that believes by professionalising agriculture and introducing new technologies, agribusinesses will improve profitability, farmers will reap more benefit and youth will be attracted to the sector.
AgBook assists farmers to learn financial and business concepts and attain the skills required to enable them to play a key role in driving the acceleration in growth of their business and the agriculture sector. It enables youth and their families to learn and improve their knowledge, change their attitudes and enhance their skills needed for farm commercialisation and increasing their incomes – while working on their own farms.
PNGAC has partnered with AgBook to deliver business training and coaching programs within the framework of a Farming Family Development Roadmap.
Through a structured process we aim to initially inspire farming families to consider new ways of doing things, introducing business and financial concepts.
Secondly, through a Farming as a Business Program, we seek to introduce new concepts and practice, covering a range of important topics across business management, marketing and financial management.
Finally, our programs take purposeful action and aim to transform new skills and knowledge into ongoing behaviour. This is implemented through a business coaching program that supports farmers in their business journey.
“We asked AgBook to inspire our women and youth to consider farming as a business. Nicole was able to generate a lot of enthusiasm amongst our farming groups and even many men turned out to learn new skills. AgBook is now a central part of our strategy to develop farm business plans for all our farmers”. PNG Agriculture Company
“Thank you so much, I really enjoy your training – excellent keep it up” JU, participant
“Encourage every individual farmer to take part in such training” EW, participant
Financial and Digital Inclusion
PNGAC and MiBank entered into a Memorandum of Agreement that now enables PNGAC shareholders the opportunity to finance business inputs for their farms.
To date, loans have been provided for inputs such as labour hire, pest control and establishing diversified enterprises like chicken raising.
MiBank have confidence in the professional standards of PNGAC and are prepared to extend their risk profile to include small farmers in return for access to many more customers.
PNGAC pay farmers to their own bank accounts which enables them to create a transaction history and a banking relationship.
Along with banking, PNGAC is in the planning stages of digitizing our supply chain processes, ensuring traceability from the farmer to the market. We envisage our customers will even be able to click on a QR code to find out the farmer who produced our chocolate.
Confidence in the finance sector will encourage more banks to invest in rural PNG, driving the cost of banking down further for the benefit of farmers
Youth Development
PNGAC places a strong emphasis on the development of youth and encouraging them back to the agriculture sector. According to the last PNG census, ~54% of the population are under the age of 25, and 18% between the age of 15-24. It is predicted that the next census will reveal the proportion of people in PNG between these ages will rise further.
With many farmers ageing, and young people not actively seeking to participate in the sector, there remains a risk that PNG will not have the labour force to reap the potential benefits from the sector.
Our young population is an opportunity for PNG. They experience connectivity like no other population group. They are well positioned to be responsive and adaptive to changes in their environments. Young people are ready to adopt new ways of doing things. They have an intuitive understanding of, and are readily able to adopt new technologies that can unlock PNG’s potential.
Youth can play a major role in transforming the agriculture sector from being dominated by low productivity subsistence gardens to an increasing number of profitable small businesses. As farmers watch and see development in their own communities, they will begin to shed their reluctant pessimistic views, and become inspired to adopt new ways of doing business.
