African Cashew Alliance

Nigerian investors in KD Food Processing had just finished building and furnishing a factory when they received an order for two 16 MT containers of processed cashews, which the company shipped in January to the Richard Franco Agency in the U.S. Located in Kaduna in northern Nigeria, KD Food Processing is also working to develop a promising domestic market.

"We are continuing to process for the export market while developing new and different products for the local market,” Project Coordinator Garbo Dikko said.

Their success is far from overnight. After visiting another processor in Ibadan in 2000, Dikko sold the idea for KD Processing to a group of investors, and they began building the factory. But construction took more than six years, hampered by sky-high loan interest rates. Processing machines from India sat in crates while the building slowly took shape.

In 2006 and 2007, Dikko shared information and experiences with other cashew stakeholders at two national ACA meetings in Nigeria. He traveled to Ghana twice to participate in trainings from the West Africa Trade Hub: learning how to increase marketing and packaging capacity and about the benefits of the African Growth and Opportunities Act. Dikko also attended the opening of Afokantan Processing, a cashew processing factory in neighboring Benin, which was fostered through connections made by the ACA.

"The ACA helped us overcome some of our struggles,” Dikko said.

The Nigerian knows that much of the hard work lies ahead — particularly in building an optimum labor force, which industry experts say takes up to three years.

“We already buy the best quality cashews in Nigeria. Now we are working on increasing output of the highest grades, meaning whole nuts,” Dikko said. “We are doing what we can to create and keep a skilled workforce — through a lot of training and introducing incentives to stay with us.”

Contact Garba Dikko at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it