“…Some studies have reported large‐scale investments in processing facilities and/or contract farming. These have been observed in the maize VCs in Ghana (Ragasa, Lambrecht, & Kufoalor, 2018) and Nigeria (Ofuoku & Agbamu, 2016), as well as in the rice VCs in Nigeria (Awotide, Fashogbon, & Awoyemi, 2015), Benin (Maertens & Vande Velde, 2017) and Ghana (Bidzakin, Fialor, & Yahaya, 2018). In horticultural food VCs in Rwanda, the emergence of contracts, direct relationships between farmers and retailers and the integration of agricultural production by processors has been observed (Verhofstadt & Maertens, 2013), while in Tanzania, the food system has begun supplying a wide variety of locally processed, high‐quality products which are competitive relative to imports (Ijumba, Snyder, Tschirley, & Reardon, 2015).…”