Up until June 2010 - Kilimo Trust was a grant making organization providing and managing grants to other NGOs in the EAC Region with resources from Gatsby Charitable Foundation and other Philanthropic Organizations. In October 2010, Kilimo Trust made a bold decision to change its way of working from a grant maker to a Specialized Agency undertaking Direct Implementation and Management of programmes and projects in partnership with and/or on behalf of governments, international and regional organizations, and the private sector.

We still remain focused on supporting the comercialisation of small and medium producers and other agro-entrepreneurs, but by embarking on this new path, Kilimo Trust is now more directly responsible for achieving verifiable results and outcomes for the programmes and projects it supports and implement. After making this decision we invested our own resources to initiate an Analysis and Scoping of Strategic Food Commodities in the EAC Region. The ambition is to provide evidence that can be used to articulate a regional collaborative and trade-based strategy for food security, as well as for enhanced income generation through agriculture.

ALL the projects we had initiated through grants we made to other organization, will continue to their completion. We will not be making any new grants - instead we have started to implement projects directly through our own significantly expanded technical staff from all the Partner States of the EAC. We have already completed one small project in South Sudan, and are embarking on a major project in Uganda to link commercialized agricultural SMEs to the regional market. We have also continued with direct implementation of two projects that were previously grant-funded. One in Southern Highlands of Tanzania and other in Northern Uganda. Therefore, our Direct Implementation Portfolio is growing rapidly.

Kilimo Trust remains an independent not-for-profit organization working on agriculture for development across the East Africa Community (EAC) Region - in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda - and more recently in the new Republic of South Sudan. Its aim is to promote regional solutions to local problems in ways that make agricultural markets work better for the reduction of poverty and elimination of hunger.

The Trust has over six years of experience in making and managing grants to programmes and projects designed to: strengthen agricultural value chains; build 'investable entities" of smallholders to enable them "graduate" and become key players in local, national, and regional value chains; improve financial services for small and medium scale agricultural enterprises; and create avenues for scaling-up technical, policy, and institutional innovations.