Gracious Redwoods works with smallholder farmers with a reliable route to market and fair prices for their produce. Our mission is to create transparent, efficient and commercially viable village agent sourcing networks to supply local, regional and international buyers with high quality and traceable produce.
Gracious Redwood’s Trade Transparency Service (TTS) formalizes value chain transactions and improves efficiency, so that rural agricultural markets work better. We deal in a range of value chains. Gracious Redwood brokers deals on behalf of small-scale farmers, bringing together their ‘supply power’ to better negotiate prices, engage directly with volume buyers and benefit from economies of scale. We offer commodity sourcing services to off-takers contributing to the development of sustainable supply chains. Gracious Redwoods also enables aggregators to grow their business generating rural employment
opportunities.
Gracious Redwoods is a for-profit company, incorporated in Nairobi. We have been operational in Kenya and Uganda since 2015, with an ambitious and experienced leadership team driving the development of the business, to grow our social impact and reach commercial viability. By 2020 Gracious Redwoods aims to provide a market linkage service to 30,000 farmers, for approximately 10,000MT of produce, worth about US$6 million annually. On average we enable farmers to earn 20% more from their produce. If you are interested to know more and join us on this path to scale, please get in touch.
Smallholder farmers in Uganda work in unorganized staple food markets, with limited transport, lack of finance for aggregation and no connection between producers and
final buyers. Farmers are often forced to sell to middlemen for low prices, off-takers struggle to get a reliable supply of quality produce and rural employment opportunities are limited.
Gracious Redwoods brings visibility to supply chain transactions to address these challenges and integrate smallholder farmers into sustainable supply chains.
Gracious Redwoods establishes networks of village agents who provide our Trade Transparency Service (TTS) to rural communities. Our mobile enabled trading and payment platform enables collaborative supply chain management, allowing price setting, tracking of produce from collection to delivery and of payments from buyer to farmer.
Gracious Redwoods provides trade finance so that farmers can be paid ‘Cash-on-the-bag’ on delivery of produce and to cover transaction costs to get produce to buyers. We carry out market analysis, identify buyers and manage supplier relationships.
We start with a simple value chain analysis, so we understand the market demand and supply for a commodity.
We use our platform to check out the commercial viability and social impact of potential transactions.
Next we negotiate supply contracts or Local Purchase Orders (LPOs) with buyers.
Deals which break-even can now be approved on our platform.
Agents display the price.
Farmers bring produce to a collection point, the agent checks quality, weighs and then triggers a payment directly from Gracious Redwoods to the farmer’s mobile or bank account.
Gracious Redwoods manages the aggregation from different agents, transaction logistics and delivery to the final buyer.
Gracious Redwoods and Agents earn a commission linked to the volume of produce sourced and its quality.
After buyer payment is received all figures are finalized.
If there is any profit it is shared equally between farmers and Gracious r at the end of the season.
