- Impact Overview
- Stories & Case Studies
- Lessons Learned
Recognising the failures
alongside the achievements.
ACE has published its setbacks as openly as its successes, in the belief that other initiatives facing the same challenges benefit more from an honest account than a polished one. These lessons are drawn from that record.
A price message alone does not change behaviour
A pilot with 250 farmers produced 70 contracts in two months. Scaled to 12,000 farmers, nothing happened — commissions could not cover the cost of the messages. ACE concluded that farmers receiving prices also need to understand quality and quantity requirements and the principles of collective marketing, which is why market information is now paired with training and field support.
Trade facilitation is harder than it looks
Logistics can take a week and settlement the same. When a farmer decides to sell, they are usually responding to an urgent need for cash, and the rural trader pays immediately. A 10–20% premium is not always attractive against that. ACE calls trade facilitation the Achilles’ heel of its services.
Trust in intermediaries has to be earned, not assumed
ACE launched a bridge finance modality advancing funds to traders at the start of the season. Too many recipients deposited less than agreed, carving out profits upfront and pushing receipts into loss. ACE stopped the modality when it became clear that undercutting the system was the norm rather than the exception.
Policy can undo years of work overnight
The 2016 food aid response imported maize while the private sector held an oversupply, and farmers recorded the lowest farm gate prices ACE had ever seen. Government market interventions have repeatedly caused systemic losses on the Warehouse Receipt System — a reminder that structured trade cannot be built in isolation from the policy environment.
Access to finance is a tool, not a guarantee
IFPRI’s analysis of every warehouse receipt ever issued found no simple rule for when storing and financing is profitable. Receipt finance can be very risky when markets experience external interventions. ACE still believes providing farmers with choices and access to finance is crucial, even where the choice is hard to get right.
Institutions need strategies, not just projects
Institutions including ACE have at times been reduced to implementing partners for donors’ three- to five-year projects, jumping from project to project to stay alive while the main transformational strategies are neglected. ACE’s position is direct: it has to be the other way around — support strong institutional strategies, then implement them project by project.