The BIF Project
The Business Innovation Facility (BIF) is a five-year DFID-funded market systems development programme that aims to improve the lives of the poor in three countries - Malawi, Myanmar and Nigeria.
About BIF
The Department for International Development’s (DFID) UK Business Innovation Facility (BIF) project ran from 2010 – 2019. Between 2010 and 2013, the learning phase of the project was implemented in which business innovations that promoted development of inclusive business models supported.
From 2014 – 2019, building on the successes of the learning phase, the second phase applied a Market System Development approach to create inclusive markets in 4 produce markets (Aquaculture, Cassava, Dairy & Maize) and one cross-cutting market, Agric Information and Advisory Services, across Nigeria, with a view to enhancing incomes for smallholder farmers.
The overall contract holder was PwC UK, and The Convention on Business Integrity Ltd. (Gte.) was contracted to develop and run the Nigeria Country Window.
How Nigeria performed
The Programme which was run in Nigeria, Malawi & Myanmar with two Private Sector support windows was scored in the final Project Completion Report, an A+ with Nigeria contributing almost 90% of the achievement. The Nigeria project budget was £10m.
The impact of partnerships
BIF worked and collaborated with different market actors across both private players and the public sectors through partnerships, facilitated access to market, promoted the uptake of quality-enhancing inputs that improved yield, strengthened linkages as well as facilitated business relationships among market players that benefited the poor and created systemic change in the market that led to behavioural change at enterprise and smallholder levels.
Taking the learning forward, we identify the findings and conclude with that missing piece, The Problem that CBi Innovations Ltd. now exists to solve.
CBI Innovations Ltd. will continue interventions from the BIF project in these areas:
Information Aggregation
Scaling projects is hindered by data gaps: limited extension workers, lack of farmer KYC data, and high data collection costs.
