“It is not always easy to identify unpolished diamonds, but it pays to reach out to small players in the agricultural subsector,” Jonathon Ciano, group managing director for Uchumi, said in his keynote speech.

Uchumi buys food products from small businesses and small-to-medium scale farmers, then puts them on their store shelves to appeal to the new group of consumers in the city. According to Ciano, Uchumi has succeeded because it meets the needs of the urban market: large volumes, low prices, high quality and safety standards, and responding quickly to price changes and customer demands.

“Most EAC customers will stop on the side of the road to get something not found in stores,” Ciano explained.

Appealing to a changing demographic of customers while trying to work with small scale farmers is a difficult balance that many companies are not willing to maintain.

“Companies say that working with smallholder farmers is so difficult. It is not difficult, it is possible,” said de Regt.

While men and women in business need to grapple with the relationship between large companies and individual farmers, governments need to provide a healthy framework for development to take place.

“Agriculture needs to be seen as a key cornerstone of poverty reduction,” stated Krepp, referring to positive government initiatives in Ethiopia and Kenya. However, Krepp pointed out that many existing government services — such as Uganda’s highly-criticized NAADS program — are not actually reaching the people, sharpening the need for NGO involvement.

“You cannot say an NGO is an intruder. The challenge with an NGO is if they indulge, they are not able to pass it off to shareholders. You can’t stay there forever,” Ciano answered when de Regt asked his opinion on the role of NGOs, from his vantage point in the private sector.

The Grameen Foundation, operating in twenty countries, is an NGO particularly focused on increasing farmers’ access to information and the possibility of using mobile phones and ICTs to reduce the cost of transactions.

“We’re trying to ride the wave of the mobile phone to provide more and better credit to smallholder farmers. We want to get small farmers on the road to thinking commercially. That doesn’t happen in one growing season; that doesn’t happen in two growing seasons. You have to be in it for the long haul,” Krepp explained.

While the markets are quickly changing, all players involved in growing the EAC’s agricultural sector must be committed to long-term development and supporting the significant percentage of people who work on small-scale farms. The theme for the second day of the conference, “Fuelling East Africa’s Agriculture Growth through Access to Finance,” focused on financing models that empowered individual farmers and fostered sustainable development.

“We must empower the poor to lift themselves out of poverty,” Krepp stated.

In his keynote speech, Ciano reminded his audience of the importance of examining underlying attitudes – from CEOs to small-scale farmers – to trigger real change in the EAC.

“When you change your thinking, you change your beliefs. When you change your beliefs, you change your expectations. When you change your expectations, you change your attitude,” he said.. “When you change your attitude, you change your behavior. When you change your behavior, you change your performance. When you change your performance, you change your life, your results, your business.”