Allow me to share a little bit about daily life of the Africa’s typical small farmer. She lives in a rural village in Sub-Saharan Africa. She farms a piece of land—land she does not own. She rises before dawn and walks miles to collect water—if there is water to be found. She works all day in a field, sometimes with a baby strapped on her back. If she’s lucky, drought, blight, or pests don’t destroy her crops, and she raises enough to feed her family—and maybe even has some left over to sell. But there’s no road to the nearest market and no one to buy from her anyway. Everyone else is as poor as she is. Now let’s consider the life of a young man in a crowded city 100 miles from that farmer. He has no job—or a job that pays pennies. He goes to the market—but the food is rotting, or priced beyond reach. He is hungry, and often angry. She has extra food to sell, and he wants to buy it. But that simple transaction can’t take place because of complex forces beyond their control. The scope and scale of this initiative that we will be rolling out over the next days, weeks, and months is really all about this woman farmer and this young man, and one billions others around the world. The daily effort to grow, buy, or sell food is the defining struggle of their lives. Empowering the world’s farmers to sow and harvest plentiful crops, and ensuring that the food they produce reaches people most in need, is a global challenge that lies at the heart of what experts refer to as “food security.” So that said how can SBA help these small scale farmers in Africa?