CassavaBags for improved gari making efficiency (CB4G)

About the project

UK-registered Partner: Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich – Ben Bennett
Africa-registered Partner: Federal University of Agriculture – Dr Celestina Omohimi

This project focused on building a partnership to address the postharvest physical deterioration of fresh cassava arriving at micro-processing enterprises making the dehydrated/fried/fermented ‘instant’ cassava derivative “gari” eaten by millions of Nigerians every day.

It was posited that the means to address this problem could be through translating the use of simple polypropylene storage bags (the NRI CassavaBag solution) to small scale gari processing in rural and peri-urban settings developing a network for scaling up CassavaBag technology with this target user in mind.

The research team collaborated with several small-scale gari processors in Nigeria’s Ogun and Benue states during the project. The study included understanding of gari production business and technical/economic feasibility of adopting CassavaBag by small-scale gari producers.

A detailed economic model was developed, which showed that adoption of the technology may result in a 30% increase in profitability. The technical analysis during the project proved that gari produced from the cassava stored in CassavaBag was of optimum quality with minimum loss.