Without mincing words, the presence of agritech start-ups have been a breath of fresh air in the agriculture sector. With the exponential power of technology, farmers, traders and consumers are able to connect beyond the brick and mortar methods African Agriculture is familiar with. Innovative ideas ventures FarmCrowdy, Farmerline, M-Farm, and others have immensely revolutionized the agriculture sector.
Investments in Africa’s Agritech sector alone have registered at least $19-million invested in the last 24 months with 82 Agritech start-ups functioning across the continent. A report by Africa’s start-up portal, Disrupt Africa indicated Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana as the leading countries for over 60 percent of start-ups that are active on the continent.
With the growing pace of modern technology agriculture, Africa’s agriculture is heading into a new and successful direction. Technology has brought advancements that were previously considered as unthinkable using traditional methods.
Many Africans have risen to the task and brought innovative solutions to the challenges at hand with the establishment of agritech start-ups in Africa. It’s even more daunting to begin a technology venture that focuses majorly on a traditional sector such as agriculture. Certain passionate and brave African entrepreneurs have journeyed road less travelled. Here are some of Africa’s top Agritech founders and their ventures with which they are changing the agricultural landscape in Africa.
Onyeka Akumah (Farmcrowdy)
Onyeka Akumah co-founded Farmcrowdy with Akindele Phillips, Tope Omotolani, Jimoh Maiyegun and Ifeanyi Anazodo in 2016. Farmcrowdy is a Nigeria’s first digital agriculture platform that is aimed at connecting farm sponsors with real farmers in order to increase food production while promoting youth participation in Agriculture.
Farmcrowdy is already impacting the lives of over 3,000 small-scale farmers over the last year. It has created a new category of online platforms and is focused on increasing food production, impacting 50,000 small-scale farmers in Nigeria over the next 5 years and engaging 2 million Nigerian youth to participate in agriculture.
Before establishing Farmcrowdy, Onyeka was the Chief Commercial Officer of Travelbeta.com. He has also worked with Konga.com as former Vice President – Marketing, Jumia.com as former Director – Marketing & Partnerships, Wakanow.com as Online Marketing Manager, E-Marketing Coordinator for Deloitte for West, East and Central Africa, and Webmaster for British Council in Nigeria.
Onyeka is currently on the Board of leading tech start-ups in New York and Lagos Nigeria. He was named 2017 Tech Start-up CEO of the Year at the Nigeria Technology Awards as well as one of the Top 20 Young Entrepreneurs to Watch in Africa by the African Youth Forum in Egypt and more.
Jamila Abass (M-Farm)
African Queen of Agritech, Jamila Abass is a computer scientist who bagged BSc in Computer Science from the University of Abdelmalek Essaadi, Morocco in 2009.
She established M-farm after reading about how farmers disconnected in terms of information are exploited by middlemen price-wise. M-Farm is a market-driven, highly-scalable, agent-facilitated, collective crop-selling platform largely focused on the horticulture value chain. It provides market solution for smallholder farmers through a network of agents who supply produce to wholesalers under contract.
Before starting M-Farm, she had worked for African Virtual University as Medical Records Systems developer and Akirachix as the Business Development Manager and currently the country manager of Wefarm.
The Kenyan born entrepreneur has received many awards including 2015 New African Woman women of the year, Forbes 10 Female Tech Founders to Watch and 20 Young Power Women in Africa, Quartz’s 30 African Innovators as well as 2015 100 most influential Africans. She is also an Aspen New Voices, Poptech Personality, Unreasonable and an Ashoka fellow.
Peter Awin (Cowtribe)
Awin Peter is a Ghanaian social entrepreneur, a technologist and the Co-Founder of Cowtribe. Peter’s love for animals was as a result of his upbringing from family of livestock keepers.
Cowtribe is Africa’s first on-demand livestock vaccine delivery company operating in over 119 communities in Ghana. He helped to build the company from ground zero to over 29,000 customers in less than 2 years and with no initial outside funding. Peter is also an active member of the start-up community in Ghana. He is a 2013 Kumvana Africa Young Leaders Fellow, a 2017 SOCAP Fellow and was voted into the Ghana Start-up Club 100.
Peter currently works with thousands of farmers in rural Ghana to increase access to critical animal health services and improve livelihoods by leveraging mobile technology.
Alloysius Attah (Farmerline)
Alloysius Attah is the CEO and Co-Founder of Farmerline. In 2013, Alloysius launched Farmerline to transform millions of farmers into successful entrepreneurs.
Ghana’s Farmerline is a platform that is focused on Ghana’s smallholder farmers. Its main aim is to provide improved information access, record keeping services and communication. It links farmers to markets, finance, inputs and equipment services via technology. Today, the start-up has profiled and served over 200,000 farmers and mapped 700,000 hectares of farmland across 11 countries.
Attah leads the overall strategy and vision of Farmerline and also focuses his efforts on business development and product design. He has received awards for his work including CBNC Africa’s Young Business Leader Award and became a laureate of the King Baudoin African Development Prize in 2017.
Dioscore Shikama (GO Ltd)
Dioscore Shikama is a tech entrepreneur who is interested in creating solutions to transform the Rwanda. AgriGO is an agritech advisory organisation aiding access to a monthly income rather than on a harvest-to-harvest (biannual) basis. GO Ltd believes that regular access to finance allows more confidence when negotiating for better crop deals.
He developed the two concepts, #GOConnect a service packages to support SMEs being present and active online and AgriGO, a mobile application for smallholder farmers, so that they can think critically and help them making informed decision, by recording what they do, predict yield and assume price.
Jehiel Oliver (Hello Tractor)
Jehiel Oliver is the founder of Hello Tractor, an agricultural technology social enterprise focused on improving food and income security for the rural poor, beginning in Nigeria. Hello Tractor has developed a low-cost Smart Tractor – embedded with GPS/telematics – which connect the real tractors to a cloud-based software. Hello Tractor’s software pairs Smart Tractor owners with farmers who can text for tractor services, all coordinated in the cloud. Through its mobile app, the startup connects tractor owners and smallholder farmers, helps track revenue share, tractor usage and schedule periodic maintenance.Hello Tractor has worked with 22,500 farmers in Nigeria & Kenya helping them achieve a 200% increase in yields.
In a recent partnership with John Deere and the Nigerian Ministry of Agriculture, the startup will help implement a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model to bring 10,000 new tractors to Nigerian Farmers across the next five years in close coordination with top stakeholders across the public and private sector, including commercial banks, private tractor service providers, dealers, and small-to-medium scale farmers.
Jehiel is responsible for the overall management and strategy of Hello Tractor. Prior to Hello Tractor, Jehiel founded Aya Consulting, a boutique development. At Aya he worked in over ten countries, including conflict zones. Through his work in agriculture and rural markets, Jehiel recognized a real need for low-income (majority women) farmers to access affordable farm machinery, leading him to found Hello Tractor.
He has been honored with numerous awards for his work in social entrepreneurship including being recognized by Foreign Policy Magazine as a Top 100 Global Thinker for 2016. He was appointed under the Obama Administration as a member of the President’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa, where he chaired the technology subcommittee. Prior to Hello Tractor, Oliver worked in consulting and investment banking. Outside of work, Oliver remains active serving on the board of Shared Interest and H4H, both impact investment funds focused in sub-Saharan Africa.
Grant Brooke and Peter Njonjo (Twiga Foods)
Twiga Foods was created in 2014 to reduce fragmentation in the produce market. The agritech startup runs a mobile-based B2B food supply platform that supplies fresh fruits and vegetables sourced from farmers in rural Kenya to small- and medium-sized vendors, outlets and kiosks in the country’s capital, Nairobi. The mobile-based cashless platform allows Twiga Foods to offer higher prices and a guaranteed market to farmers, and lower prices and a reliable supply to vendors. It also helps to reduce post-harvest losses and waste as it matches demand with supply. Consumers also benefit as they are able to buy fresher products at lower prices thanks to a more efficient supply chain. The startup works with about 8,370 farmers and 5,226 vendors to source and deliver quality produce at fair prices. Currently, Twiga is Kenya’s largest seller of bananas, potatoes, tomatoes, and other staple commodities.
Surprisingly, not so much is in public space about Twiga Founders prior to starting the venture. CEO and co-founder, Grant Brooke was born and raised in Texas, Grant co-founded Twiga after years of academic work in Kenya’s informal markets. Brooke found himself in Kenya during graduate school studying the impact of religion on economic choice-making in informal markets and spending a lot of time researching food vendors. From there, he went to Oxford to pursue a doctorate on the subject. At Oxford, he met and became friends with Peter Njonjo, the former GM for Coca Cola in East Africa. The two began to discuss how they might apply Coke’s distribution model to produce, and from there Twiga was born. Grant has led Twiga to being one of East Africa’s faster growing enterprises, attracting top global investors, talent, development partners, and media attention in the likes of CNN, CCTV, Fast Company, and The BBC with investment raking up over $20.4million from various venture investors like DOB Equity, Omidyar Network, Wamda Capital, 1776 Seed Investors, Blue Haven Initiative, Alpha Mundi, TLCom Partners and most recently The International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Twiga promises to be that largest grocer in Africa without opening a single grocery store.
Closing
In the plight to feed a growing world population, the use of technology in agriculture has repeatedly been identified as a crucial link. Africa is home to many of these Agric Innovations and while we agree that more can be done, our journey in that path has been worthwhile and there is so much more to harvest from every stride Africa makes in Agritechnology.
With all these Agritech start-up founders and innovators currently solving Africa’s agricultural potential through their platforms, Africa might be well on the way to becoming the food basket of the world, with its young and talented labour force emerging in the continent.