The Société Sénégalaise des Filières Alimentaires (SFA) [Senegalese Company of the Food Industries] is a social business that promotes the production of quality rice by smallholders in the Senegal River Valley through a long-term partnership. SFA provides them with access to financing and technical support, then processes the paddy into white rice and sells it on the Senegalese market.
THE ORGANISATION AND THE FOUNDATION
The Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation has been a shareholder in the Senegalese Food Industry (SFA) since 2013. SFA benefitted from the Solidarity Bankers programme: a high-level expert, Head of the Group Purchasing Information System project management unit at Crédit Agricole S.A., spent two weeks in the field to support SFA in optimising its information system.
CONTEXT OF THE MISSION
Keen to develop its activities, SFA wanted to benefit from an external viewpoint and the support of an expert in information systems to develop a technological application for local teams in order to manage better and to optimise their operations and the follow-up of producers. Our Crédit Agricole expert was able to visit the SFA plants in Saint Louis and Dakar where she took stock of the information system through interviews with the various SFA stakeholders. She also worked with them on the digitalisation of the rice collection chain in order to optimise productivity and yields.
RESULTS
By visiting the field, she was able to understand the different stages of rice collection and processing and to propose recommendations. Thanks to the implementation of the management information system under development and a weighing application integrated into the Sage software, the Solidarity Banker has enabled SFA to improve its industrial activity and production conditions, as well as the technical and financial monitoring of producers. Since the improvement of its production system, SFA’s ambition has been to double its volume of activity by 2022, while supporting the local rice industry in Senegal.
This article was published in “Our technical assistance offer”, accessible here