Business Development Support for Agrifood MSMEs Deserves a Bigger Place in Donor Program Design

That layer is agrifood businesses. The businesses doing the real work of directly feeding communities on the continent, every day. The food processors, the food brands, the value-addition enterprises producing, packaging, and selling food across our cities, towns, and communities. Most of them are doing this work without the business support that would make them stronger, more resilient, and able to keep going long after any program has closed.

That gap should not be overlooked. It is where food systems transformation succeeds or fails.

An agrifood business that is not commercially strong cannot deliver what food systems programs need from it. Think about what programs are actually counting on agrifood businesses to do. Source quality ingredients reliably. Process and package food to the standards formal buyers will accept. Distribute through channels that reach the people nutrition goals are designed to serve. Create jobs. Keep prices competitive. And stay open long after the program has closed and moved on.

Commercial strength is not a separate business goal sitting beside those outcomes. It is what makes all of them possible. Commercial weakness in agrifood SMMEs does not always look obvious, either. A business can report stable revenue while its margins quietly shrink. It can stay open while the founder works longer hours for less take-home pay. It can survive a shock by cutting product lines or switching to cheaper inputs. These are moves that look like adaptation from the outside but signal fragility from within.

When an agrifood business operates like that, every food system outcome depending on its delivery becomes shaky and a mirage. Not because the business has failed, but because it never received the support that would have made it strong enough to deliver consistently.

Business development support for an African agrifood MSME is not a line item that makes a program look comprehensive. It is infrastructure. And like any infrastructure, it only works when it is properly resourced, well-implemented, and given enough time to show returns.

The returns, gladly, are already documented. A 2023 ISF Advisors study analyzed data from 15 Business Development Service (BDS) providers across East and West Africa. The findings show that for every $1 spent on quality business development support, agrifood SMEs generated $7 in additional revenue and raised $12 in capital.

Those are not small numbers. It is one of the best returns available to anyone investing in food systems outcomes. Yet business development support is still regularly underfunded and undervalued in donor program design.

A donor may fund a training workshop at the start of a cycle. That is not business development support. A one-off planning session before a market linkage activity is not business development support either. What actually builds commercial strength for agrifood MSMEs is sustained, hands-on support on the internal systems of an agrifood business; from pricing, financial management, operations, market access, investment readiness, to nutrition positioning, done in a sequence that reflects how businesses actually grow.

Donors and investors who invest in well-planned business development support get stronger businesses as an outcome. And stronger agrifood businesses carry food systems outcomes further, and longer, than any program working alongside fragile businesses ever could.

This is the exact gap Impacter Solutions was built to close as a BDS provider and a Center for Management Development (CMD) accredited trainer. Agrifood MSMEs need more than general advice. They need a diagnostic-first approach that starts by understanding what is actually holding a food business back before recommending a solution and hand-holding a business to implement that solution until it succeeds.

In practice, that looks like helping a founder understand their numbers well enough to protect their margins. Building operational systems so the business can grow without everything depending on the owner. Getting a food business ready for market conversations it would otherwise lose, and funding conversations it would otherwise never be prepared for.

These are not complicated ideas. They are specific, practical, and sequenced systems. And they are the difference between an agrifood business that delivers what programs need from it, and one that quietly shrinks after a brief, one-off intervention ends.

The evidence is there. The demand from agrifood businesses is real. The connection between commercial strength and food systems outcomes is direct and traceable. What is needed now is donor program budgets and designs that reflect all of that.

Agrifood businesses are already doing the work. The question is whether the support around them is strong enough to make that work last.