Helping smallholder groundnut farmers build profitable livelihoods by connecting them to better markets, inputs, and the structures that make farming financially viable.

Jeyarani’s Story

Her name is Jeyarani, she lives with her daughter, they can all cultivate, but they are not making profits and struggling to meet daily needs. She has a daughter with a mental disability and she is older. They have land but can’t make money off it. They say a middle-man comes and collect the groundnuts, but they have little knowledge of the market. They don’t know any other buyers and they don’t know much about how the price is set or even what the market price is. They take out loans for working capital and have to pay interest of nearly 60% back to the middle-man. They don’t make much of a profit, and they also don’t really know how much when we ask them.

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The Wider Picture

The groundnut sector in the Mullaitivu District is not a failing sector. Demand is strong, processing capacity is growing, and the crop suits this soil and climate well. But the families doing the farming capture very little of what they grow. Farmers sell individually, with no collective bargaining power, to intermediaries who set the price. Input suppliers and extension services rarely reach these villages.

This disconnect is not accidental. These communities received minimal agricultural development support before, during, and after the civil war. The result is a generation of farming families working a profitable crop in isolation from the systems that would make it financially viable. That is what this project exists to change.

What We Are Doing

We are working with groundnut farming families across Mullaitivu to address the specific barriers that have kept smallholders disconnected from the value their crops generate. The work has three interlocking components: building the technical knowledge farmers need to improve their yields, connecting them to markets and buyers at a fair price, and establishing the collective structures that give individual farmers a voice they have never had alone.

• Farming better from the ground up.

  We work directly with each farming household on soil management, improved cultivation techniques, and pest control. We introduce seed varieties suited to this soil and connect farmers to agronomists and input suppliers who can sustain those improvements after the programme ends.

• Getting a fair price for a good crop.

  We map the groundnut value chain from farm to processor, identify the price gaps and access barriers, then work with both farmers and buyers to close them. Farmers engage with the market as informed participants, not as price-takers.

• 300 farmers with one voice.

  We support the formation of farmer producer groups that give individual smallholders a collective voice to negotiate together, source inputs together, and access government schemes that are out of reach for a single family working alone.

How This Work Lasts

A better harvest this season is not the goal. The goal is a farming community that is connected to markets, protected by collective structures, and capable of sustaining those gains without ongoing external support.

• Participatory from the start. We do not arrive with a blueprint. We begin by working alongside the farmers themselves, the women’s collectives already active in these villages, and the community leaders who understand what has and has not worked here before. The programme is shaped by the people it is for.
• Validated family by family. Every farming household is assessed individually. We understand the land they work, the inputs they can access, the markets they currently sell to, and the specific barriers they face. The support is calibrated to that reality, not to a generic model.
• Lifting families into the system. We connect willing farmers to government agricultural extension services, input subsidy schemes, and certification pathways that most smallholders in this region have never been able to access. Once a farmer is inside these systems, the connection holds beyond our direct involvement.
• Feeding the lessons back. We coordinate with the Department of Agriculture, divisional secretariats, and relevant government bodies to share what we are learning about why smallholders in this region remain disconnected from value chains. The goal is not just to help the families in this project. It is to help the system see them.

When this work is done, 110 farming families across Mullaitivu will know what their crop is actually worth, sell it to buyers they chose, and stand inside a producer group that speaks for them instead of a middleman who used to set every term. The 60% interest that once ate into Jeyarani’s working capital has no foothold in a system built around fair prices from the start.

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A Crop That Finally Pays What It’s Worth

Groundnuts were never the problem here. The market around them was. Once farmers can price their own crop, choose their own buyers, and stand together instead of alone, a good harvest finally becomes a good living.