cancelled· Health

Increasing efficiency of tea factory in operations and marketing

Prithvinagar Small Farmer Agriculture Cooperative (PSFAC) is located approximately 10 km South of Bhadrapur close to the border with India. It focuses on tea production, processing and marketing. and it was established in 1995 in response to promote the production of tea by smallholder farmers, as the land in the area is very suitable for tea production. The cooperative started with only 25 members and 1250 NPR shared capital. Now the cooperative has 1987 members and shared capital of 17 million NPR. Besides promoting tea growing the cooperative was initially mainly involved in the business of savings and credit services to its members. Until 1999 the cooperative also collected tea leaves from its members and sold it to a private tea factory. However, the prices offered by this factory where relatively low and there was no timely payment. Therefore the cooperative created in 2009 the ambition to invest in its own processing factory. The large tea factory was built with government funding support. Total investment was 80 million NPR, of which 30 million government grant, 20 million loan SKBB (5% interest) and 30 million share capital of the members. The factory started production in July 2014. The tea factory started producing and making profits, but there are lots of opportunities to increase the profit within the processing factory if they improve their efficiency and increase marketing activities. The partnership will work on constraints that were limiting Prithivinagar to scale bigger and provide maximum returns to their members. On this basis, one of the main activities will be to develop production plan and integrate it with marketing plan. The activities will also include strengthening their supply and establishing linkages with different marketing channels to ensure maximum sales. Provide better returns to members by increasing efficiency of tea factory and improving marketing channels.