<p></p><p>The "African Cashew Initiative" of the Ministry of Development has awarded this year OECD DAC Price. The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) thus awarded innovations that show after the pilot phase a broad impact. <br></p> <p>The aim of the launched seven years ago Cashew Initiative of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) is to increase the income of more than 400,000 farmers in five African countries to improve their competitiveness and to increase the processing of nuts in Africa, so is the value in the producing countries remains. Target countries include Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Mozambique. <br></p> <p>By Cashew Initiative, the income of the trained farmers have increased by $ 120 per year, explained the BMZ. This is an enormous increase in the face of about 120 to 450 US dollars annual income of a rural smallholders. The quality of nuts has improved and the yield per hectare have increased significantly, by up to 80 percent. This makes farmers more competitive internationally. The initiative also training entrepreneurial skills of farmers, who are usually not organized in associations. So they are trained, for example, for negotiations with traders. <br></p> <p>"The supported factories have increased sixfold its processing capacity and the local processing has doubled from five to ten percent," states the BMZ. Further processing of the nuts in the country will expand the initiative further. Around half of the world's cashew production is produced by 1.5 million smallholder cashew farmers in Africa. <br></p> <p>In the now-starting the third phase, the project will be extended according to BMZ to other countries in order to reach at least one million small farmers. The Cashew Initiative is part of a multi-country program, in which not only the cashew value chains cotton, cocoa and rice are promoted.<br></p><p></p>