Trade Dialogues on Food

Bolaji Akinboro & Ken Njoroge have built a pan-African tech company providing a one-stop digital marketplace. Cellulant tackles high market fragmentation and low financial inclusion in Africa by organizing marketplaces with an underlying digital payment infrastructure that solves the problems often faced in Africa by businesses, retailers and consumers. Cellulant now works in 33 African countries, with 94% of its customer base never having used banking before. Its technology is being used as far away as Afghanistan. It relies on distributed ledger technology to create trust throughout the agricultural value chain, from banks, agribusiness, exporters, government agencies, input-sellers, all the way to the farmers themselves.

What if you could invest in Nigerian agriculture from the relative comfort of your own sitting room in Lagos? Onyeka Akumah is making that possible and reshaping agricultural value chains as he does so. The technology entrepreneur is the Founder and CEO of Farmcrowdy, an agricultural platform connecting small-scale farmers to investors with the goal of boosting local food production. The company took off fast, receiving its first investment of $60,000 just a month after launching, but went on to raise $2,000,000 in equity funds over the past three years for its daily operations. Farmcrowdy and the Oyo State government announced a partnership in August 2019 that will involve 50,000 farmers and the company has now crowdfunded over $15,000,000 to work with 116,000 small holder farmers across 17 states in Nigeria, with plans to expand its model across Africa.

Kikonde Mwatela is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Twiga Foods, a technology enabled business-to-business food distribution platform that builds fair and reliable markets for agricultural producers, food manufacturers and retailers based on transparency and efficiency. The company sources products from 17,000 plus farmers across Kenya and delivers them directly to 5,000 vendors per day in Nairobi and its environs. As part of its expansion plan, Twiga Foods is set to build a new state of the art distribution center that will have custom-made cold rooms, conveyors and sorting equipment, enabling Twiga Foods to widen its supply-chain services in Kenya and beyond.

Like most good business ideas, the Uber for tractor hire seems incredibly obvious, but it took Kamal Yakub to make it happen. Like many African countries, Ghana has a majority of smallholder farmers who cannot afford to buy a tractor, but for whom a couple of days of ploughing make a huge difference to agricultural productivity. More than enough to pay for hiring a tractor. Connecting tractors to farmholders via mobile phone is Trotro Tractor’s raison d’être. Yakub has enabled a great leap forward in rural incomes, allowing farmers to make more investments in their land, pay for children’s education, and slow the drift of children to the cities in search of work. He is a great advocate of getting young people into agriculture, saying that this technology makes it far more profitable now to grow crops. “If you used to do two days on an acre with four people, now you use 45 minutes to finish that acre so it allows you to do more,” Yakub told reporters. He is now expanding to Zimbabwe, with other markets in sight.