AgroCenta, the Ghanaian startup which aims to develop the inclusion of smallholder farmers throughout the agricultural value chain with the support of digital innovation, has just raised $790,000 in pre-series A funding round from UK charity Shell Foundation, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) (FCDO), AV Ventures and Rabobank Foundation.
“This is a significant milestone for AgroCenta, having the support of leading institutions, particularly with the COVID-19 backdrop, underlining the strength of AgroCenta and the importance of its mission. The demand for agricultural raw materials from offtakers in the brewery, manufacturing and consumer sector is increasing exponentially because of the easing of the COVID-19 restrictions that were put in place by the government of Ghana, hence this capital injection will help to secure purchases at fair and transparent prices from smallholders — a much needed lifeline for many who are at the proverbial bottom of the pyramid,” said Francis Obirikorang, AgroCenta’s CEO and Co-Founder Michael Ocansey.
Francis Obirikorang, AgroCenta’s CEO
Why The Investors Invested
All of the investors in this round — Shell Foundation, Foreign, UK Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), AV Ventures and Rabobank Foundation — are focused on impact investing. AV Ventures, in particular, has set up a fund in Ghana with focus on SMEs that show significant potential for growth and impact, particularly for small-scale farmers. The Netherland-based Rabobank Foundation is the impact investment fund of Dutch bank Rabobank founded in 1974. The fund invests for self-sufficiency of farmer organizations in 22 countries in Africa, including Ghana.
The investors’ belief in AgrocCenta also draws from the traction the startup had already achieved. In 2018, the startup won the Seedstars World competition. AgroCenta had previously, in 2016 been funded by GreenTec Partners. In 2018, the startup was the recipient of a US$250,000 (£200,000) GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator Grant funded by UK DFID, Australian AID, and the GSMA and its members. The startup said more than 46,000 farmers are already registered on the platform, with over $500,000 in commodities traded, mainly maize, white and yellow, soybeans, cowpeas and sorghum.
Founded in 2016, by former founders of Swappaholics, Francis Obirikorang Obirikorang and Michael Ocansey who were also former employees of the agro company Esoko, AgroCenta has developed the Crop Chain platform. It facilitates trade between smallholder farmers and consumers and / or buyers but also provides market information, storage and delivery solutions and financial services to smallholder farmers in Ghana.
AgroCenta was given birth to as a result of the pivot of Swappaholics, an online platform where users were able to connect and swap products, skills and services.
“We were faced with user growth,” said CEO, Francis Obirikorang, of the fate of Swappaholics. “Our numbers trickled down over time because we faced stiff competition from other classifieds in Ghana who had a lot of financial muscles to spend on advertisement.”
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions. He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance. He is also an award-winning writer
Market inefficiencies saddle the farm-to-market sector in countries across sub-Saharan Africa. Smallholder farmers face sub-optimal yields, food losses and waste, and unfair market returns. Informal market vendors, who dominate the last-mile of distribution, have little control over the quality, quantity and regularity of the produce they sell. In this interview, FINCA Ventures chatted with Elia Timotheo, founder and CEO of East Africa Fruits, to grasp how this Tanzanian-based food distributor is bringing greater efficiency to the agricultural value chain. East Africa Fruits formalizes the informal farm-to-market sector by providing a stable, fair market for horticulture crops, transporting goods using cold-storage and distributing to food buyers to improve productivity and incomes for smallholder farmers and informal vendors.
Elia Timotheo, founder and CEO of East Africa Fruits
Your mom was a Tanzanian food entrepreneur. How did this upbringing and other experiences inspire you to build and run an agriculture company?
Elia: East Africa Fruit’s origins came from a mix of factors in my life, but my first motivation was to never be employed. I wanted to run a business like my mother. Despite not going to school, my mom began her first business in the 1980s selling fast food in the Kilimanjaro area of Tanzania. I grew up watching and helping her, a hardworking single mother, who now has five restaurants. She inspired me and passed along the fundamentals of business, but I didn’t know what kind of enterprise I wanted to run. While I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to work with the Ministry of Agriculture. Through this, I participated in a program that allowed me to meet with farmers to understand their challenges and what the government could be doing to address their agricultural needs. My program team visited over 3,000 farmers across Tanzania, and together we observed patterns around food waste and transactional middlemen, all of which resulted in reduced incomes for smallholders. This was the “ah-ha” moment that put me on a mission to develop a business solution to eliminating post-harvest losses and increasing incomes for small-scale farmers.
Tell us more about the issue of post-harvest loss. Why is it such a big problem and how is East Africa Fruits tackling this issue?
Elia: Roughly half of what farmers produce never reaches the market, and this loss is spread out across the farm-to-market value chain. First, farmers may lack the knowledge and training to properly care for their farms, produce and harvests, resulting in 20 to 25 percent of losses. Second, farmers sell produce to brokers who use inappropriate vehicles to transport perishable produce, leading to another 10 percent of losses. Lastly, in the market, it’s very difficult to sell all the produce in one day or even two, yet there are no storage facilities for a truckload of produce that just spent days travelling hundreds of miles in inadequate conditions. All this results in severe losses for farmers who fail to reap the fruits of their hard work. To change this, East Africa Fruits establishes a relationship with smallholder farmers and provides training, food processing, storage and market access using cold-storage transportation. This process extends the shelf-life of produce and reduces post-harvest losses.
A key part of your business model is removing layers of middlemen in the farm-to-market value chain. Why does this need to be disrupted and how is East Africa Fruits offering a better alternative?
Elia: When I first got into the business, I began as a middleman, or broker, to understand the ecosystem. For a farmer to sell produce, he or she must sell to a broker in the local village. For that produce to reach a commercial center, like Dar es Salaam — which may be hundreds of miles away — the village broker must then sell to a transporter who will take the produce to market. There may be only one truck to choose from, so the transporter has the upper hand in price negotiations. Once in-market, the produce passes through another broker who negotiates selling to consumers. When I worked as a middleman, I saw this in action. I never met the farmer; I met a broker who spoke with the farmer and another broker who helped me hire a truck to transport my produce to the market. I was neither in control of selling my produce in the market nor was I able to set consumer pricing — I had to accept whatever prices were established for me. If I wanted to move my produce from one market to another, I was forced to pay layers of fees. All of this creates inefficiency and waste, and this is happening to most farming businesses in Tanzania. At East Africa Fruits, we reduce this complexity in several ways. First, we provide agronomic training to smallholder farmers to help them perfect their product for better-quality harvests. Second, we transport farmers’ produce post-harvest on our own trucks, from the farm, to our facilities [for collection, processing and storage], to the market. This way, our customers avoid wasting time and resources waking up hours before dawn to figure out how to get produce to market. Lastly, we offer our customers convenience: already sorted, trusted produce, on-time. All of this brings about perfection in the distribution system, characterized by greater efficiency and fairer wages.
The obvious customer in your business is the farmer, but equally important is the last-mile vendor. Can you paint us a picture of the struggles faced by informal market vendors and how you are addressing their needs?
Elia: The struggles faced by informal vendors mirror the challenges faced by smallholders. An informal vendor may wake-up at 3 or 4 am to visit one of the public markets to buy produce. Then, he or she will leave the produce with a transporter to deliver it to the informal market kiosk, a process that may take hours. We see an opportunity to reduce the amount of time and money that informal vendors spend navigating this daily routine. There is also potential to improve the security and transparency of the final product. A good example of this would be potatoes. Potatoes are usually sold in a bag where you cannot see what is inside — you can only see the few potatoes on top. Brokers exploit this by putting only the good potatoes on top and rotten produce beneath, causing the informal vendor to incur a loss. At East Africa Fruits, we sell our product in a transparent way so that vendors can see exactly what they are buying, and they can be sure that they will sell a higher percentage of everything they are buying. This leads to cost reduction and increased profitability for the vendors. It also builds up a business track record for informal vendors to help them qualify for microfinance loans to expand their businesses.
How has your business pivoted since its inception and why do you continue to tackle all elements of the farm-to-market value chain?
Elia: When we started thinking about farming, we thought about creating super-quality produce to supply exclusively to premium markets, like high-end supermarket chains, hotels and possibly for export. However, we realized this didn’t match our original vision of producing strong social impact. This forced us to pivot to where we are today: perfecting the farm distribution system, getting produce as quickly as possible from farm to retail, with emphasis on serving informal vendors in the marketplace. To do this well, we know that farmers need access to training to produce harvests of value, access to inputs like seeds and fertilizer, and access to markets for reliable and fair selling.
East Africa Fruits works with 1,300 smallholders in Tanzania and plans to reach 7,000 by 2023. What are your growth strategies and what role will technology play?
Elia: One strategy to grow the number of farmers that we work with is to multiply the number of collection centers that we manage across Tanzania. Our main facility in Dar es Salaam is responsible for storage and distribution. Collection centers are used to gather, sort and process all the produce harvested by our rural smallholder network. A combination of labor and machinery is leveraged to clean, dry, pack and store all the produce that we collect. More collection centers will bring us closer to farmers and enable us to increase our combined productivity, with a goal of moving from 95 or 98 percent sellable produce to 100 percent. In terms of technology, we hope to purchase an off-the-shelf, farmer-side, data storage software solution for building reliable customer profiles and tracking ordering patterns. This will help us anticipate volumes of produce to optimize resources in terms of purchasing from farmers and managing distribution. We are also looking to design a front-end, software solution for selling.
How will you strengthen the connection between East Africa Fruits and smallholders as you grow?
Elia: Three things come to mind. First, farmers believe in organizations that have a physical presence. Collection centers represent our #1 physical entry point into communities. Today, our collection centers are used to process produce post-harvest, to conduct monthly farmer trainings to increase their productivity, and to maintain recordkeeping. In the future, we’re considering using collection centers as agro-dealer shops or storage facilities for farmers’ produce that they do not intend to sell right away. Longer term, we are looking into leasing tractors from our centers. Second, we hold regular meetings with farmers to learn and solicit suggestions for how we may better serve them. Hearing their challenges makes us closer to them and forces us to deliver solutions. This practice comes directly from my early experiences working with the Ministry of Agriculture. A third key way for us to strengthen our relationship with farmers is to support their access to basic needs: farming inputs, microfinance loans, crop insurance.
Financial service providers struggle to serve smallholder farmers and informal SMEs, who are often deemed too risky. What opportunities do you see in financial inclusion as a result of the impact created by East Africa Fruits?
Elia: While we do work across the farm-to-market value chain, that doesn’t mean we can do everything ourselves. We see many opportunities to channel financing to small-scale farmers and informal SMEs and actively seek to connect our customers with microfinance and insurance organizations. We think about this aspect in two dimensions. Our first focus is on enhancing farmer productivity given existing farm sizes — better inputs to create better outputs to help farmers grow incomes. The second dimension is through farm expansion. Moving a farmer from half an acre to two acres will have an impact on the cost of production, which can be covered through financing solutions. The farmers working with East Africa Fruits have developed a strong business track record, which can be shared with microfinance institutions like FINCA Microfinance Bank [“FINCA Tanzania”] to help smallholders qualify for loans to support the purchase of inputs, assets or expansion of farms. Similar benefits would apply to informal vendors looking to leverage microfinance loans to grow beyond one market kiosk. Because our customers are cut off from traditional financing [e.g., because of socioeconomic status or rural location] they solicit loans from local village brokers who charge crazy high interest rates, which only perpetuate the cycle of poverty that they face. This practice is most common when it’s time to pay school feels prior to harvest.
Imagine it’s five years from now and East Africa Fruits is making international headlines. What would that headline be and why is this important to you?
Elia: “Creating a Sustainable Environment for 20,000 Smallholders to Thrive” — This would demonstrate tremendous gains in smallholder productivity and a sizeable market for small-scale farmers and informal vendors to sell their produce.
Why were you excited to have FINCA Ventures come on-board as an investor?
Elia: It’s always helpful to bring in a fresh set of eyes and thinking as we look to scale our business. FINCA brings expertise in financial services and we hope to collaborate with its Tanzanian microfinance institution to deliver financing solutions to our farmers and vendors. To have an investor who is equally committed to the success of our company and our customers is most exciting for us.
So, what’s your favorite fruit or vegetable?
Elia: Pineapple! If I must pick a vegetable, I’d go for spinach.
FINCA Ventures is an impact investing initiative of FINCA International that provides patient capital and support to early-stage social enterprises. To know more about them, click here.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions. He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance. He is also an award-winning writer.
Twiga Foods, the Kenyan agri-tech startup trying to disrupt Kenya’s food demand and supply chains, understands that Kenyans need food, and need it badly. About 36.1%, representing nearly over 18 million of Kenya’s 48 million population are hungry. This figure is worsened by the facts that:
Peter Njonjo
Over 3.4 million people face acute food insecurity in the country; and
Agricultural productivity has been stagnating in recent years due to frequent droughts, floods, and climate change, leading to only about 20 percent of Kenyan land being suitable for farming.
Interestingly, Kenya’s agricultural sector contributes about 26% — more than one-quarter — to Kenya’s entire Gross Domestic Product. This is even as about 75% of Kenya’s entire workforce, mostly spread out in rural areas, is engaged in the agricultural sector.
Africa’s Food Security Index: Click To ExpandThese facts are the reasons Twiga Foods would be the startup of the future. The startup is going after Kenya’s food sector to break the jinx of inefficiencies presently in the sector, and to ensure that the limited resources available in Kenya’s agricultural sector are well-utilised.
Its simple business model is to aggregate all food retailers and dealers, from the banana vendors buying in bulk to the avocado retailers selling in stock, and then connecting them to Kenyan farmers producing quality farm produce. This is a classic example of a business-to-business (B2B) model, so that vendors looking to purchase agricultural produce don’t have to travel miles to meet local producers of the produce, thereby saving them the transportation and logistics cost, increasing the productivity and demand for the produce of the farmers, at the same time reducing food waste.
These metrics are what TLCom Capital looked out for when it invested in Twiga Foods.
“TLcom’s general investment thesis for Africa is that given the high penetration of mobile, there are very large markets where demand is already proven and technology can play a true role in offering a superior value proposition over existing solutions,” said Ido Sum, partner at TLCom Capital which syndicated Twiga Foods’ recent $30 million fund raising led by Goldman Sachs.
Quite noteworthy is the fact that TLCom Capital is often strategic with its investments, going mostly for early comers with the huge potentials. It went for Nigeria’s Kobo360, a startup pioneering digital trucking in Nigeria through the Goldman Sachs-led $20 million investment. It also went for Andela, one of Africa’s well-funded startups. Hence, that Venture Capitalist TLCom Capital preferred to invest in tech companies in their early to growth stages, such as Twiga Foods, shows that the startup is, to a large extent, home to disrupt.
The same is also said of Goldman Sachs, America’s leading investment banker which is recently interested in Africa and international institutional firms and VCs looking to invest on the continent at a time when other international investment banks such as Credit Suisse and Barclays have cut down or exited their African operations altogether. Goldman Sachs’ investment in Twiga Foods marks its first major deal in a Kenyan firm.
In view of all these, we therefore discuss a few strategies gleaned from Twiga Foods’ quest to disrupt the Kenyan food market.
Prove A Point First But Know That Scaling Is Important
First CEO Grant Brooke simply had to find a way to scale Twiga Foods, a startup in the often neglected African startup ecosystem — agritech. Of the whole investment made into Africa’s startup ecosystem in 2018, agritech got a meagre $20.2 million, out of which Twiga Foods got $10.2 million. Compared to fintech’s $284.6 million, this is discouraging for new comers to the agritech sector.
From all indications, these figures are a representation of the fact that even though Africa has a yawning food sufficiency gap, startups who take the path of agri-businesses often face low investment appetite from investors. Nigeria’s agritech startup Farmcrowdy, one of Africa’s top-funded agritech startups for instance, has been able to raise slightly above $2 million in funding from VCs since its founding in 2016.
Of course, investors are not to blame: entering early stage startups in Africa’s agritech startup ecosystem appears foolhardy, with all the risk associated with crop yields, partly brought about by changes in climate and diseases.
So Twiga’s strategies were to first avoid the crop production stage, in preference of the post production stage when crops are ready to be harvested; and to eliminate the final consumers from its model. Consumers in the African food markets are highly dispersed, making it grossly difficult to aggregate them. They are also highly unpredictable. Pursuing them would increase cost per acquisition for any startup, at the same breath, creating unnecessary competition from dispersed local markets where they are used to buying and selling from.
Therefore, by targeting the middleman between the farmer and consumers, Twiga found an easily large market to scale. The startup already has more than 17, 000 producers for direct delivery to more than 8,500 vendors.
Africa’s Agritech Startups Who Solve The Inefficiency Problem In The Agric Supply Chain May Win
Twiga’s other strategy is simple: find an efficient way to deliver to final consumers at lower costs. Inefficiencies in the supply chain have been blamed for high food prices in African cities, where close to 90 percent of the supply comes from informal retail outlets. Kenyans spend 45 percent of their disposable incomes on food, compared to 14 percent for South Africans and 10 percent for citizens of most European countries. To solve this problem, Twiga followed a simple pattern:
Get a farmer to sign up to join Twiga.
Twiga visits and assesses the farm, then adds farmer onto system.
Twiga issues a purchase order to book the produce and indicate date of harvest.
Twiga harvests and weighs farmers produce and issues you with a receipt.
Farmers receive payment within 24 hours.
All produce is gathered at over 30 Collection Centres across Kenya from the farms.
Produce goes to the Packhouse for processing, grading and dispatch to over 60 sales routes.
A vendor signs up to join Twiga.
Twiga sales representative visits vendor and registers them onto system.
Vendor places order with sales representative.
Twiga delivers produce directly to vendors shops.
Through this, the farmer benefits from: guaranteed market; transparent pricing as seen on price boards; farming advice;resources and access to credit from Twiga’s partners. On the part of vendors, the benefits include quality produce; free delivery; assured food safety through easy tracking; access to credit from Twiga’s partners; and fair prices for produce.
The end implication of this simple process is that Kenyans would spend less to purchase food produce. This would in turn encourage them to budget more on food.
Can Using Corporate Expertise Like Twiga Foods Assist Startups To Grow Faster?
To beat the glut in investment in Africa’s agritech startup ecosystem, Twiga quickly appointed Peter Njonjo to take over from founder Grant Brooke. Although the startup has previously raised $10.3m from investors and secured $2 million in grant funding from organizations such as USAID and the GSMA in 2017, followed by a 2018 $10m investment from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), TLcom, and the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme, bringing Njonjo onboard the startup may seem more or less a strategic move to capture more market and scale quickly.
“Starting new ventures is really my skill-set and passion, while proficiently running institutions is Peter’s skill-set and passion. Twiga has an aggressive growth plan and this transition leverages on our respective expertise, ” Brooke said.
Njonjo was the most senior Kenyan at Coca Cola Company where he worked for 21 years, leading the multinational’s West and Central Africa business unit as President.
Peter Njonjo’s appointment, noted Mr Brooke, presents a first; with a senior executive in a Fortune 500 Company joining an African startup, a “clear testament of the increasing capacity of venture capital in funding and solving significant problems and harnessing opportunities on the continent.”
“If my leadership was the period in which Twiga was proving a point that there’s a better way to build food safe and secure markets, Peter’s leadership will be about institutionalizing this way of doing business and scaling it. Peter’s experience in building efficient supply chains and last-mile distribution in over 33 African countries makes him uniquely suited to lead us,” said the outgone Twiga Foods CEO Grant Brooke.
Currently, the startup has reached more $50 million in total funding since 2014 when it was founded, over $35 million achieved under Njonjo’s leadership.
Critically speaking, Twiga’s success could largely be attributed to Grant Brooke, who has built a career researching Kenya’s informal retail market, an experience dating back to his home city, Texas, in the United States. Njonjo’s appointment could be analysed as finally giving Twiga Foods an African outlook. Therefore, it is safe to say that Twiga Foods still has a long way to go in qualifying as a contemporary agritech startup founded and run by an African. Mr. Njonjo’s Africa’s first ever corporate touch at Twiga and its eventual success may however still be a lesson in strategy for African startups.
Twiga Foods: Bottom Line
To put Africa’s food needs into perspective, Kenyans have more certainty of having food than Ugandans, Rwandans, Togolese or Nigerians. This is a dire situation for the population of these countries combined, and a huge opportunity for many more African agritech startups to come onboard.
Twiga Foods has obviously found a large market for its business model. Africa’s farmers are still obscure, and remotely isolated from the large market. Twiga has started a show of allowing them to play a significant part with some force. It does this by collecting them together with technology and helping them to deliver their products to final consumers, in a safe, cost-effective and efficient way.
These are the lessons Twiga Foods has taught us in Africa’s complicated food supply chain, and why Twiga Foods may be Africa’s next unicorn (and indeed the first agritech startup to achieve such feat) in ten years to come, if it gets its processes and team right.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world
Good news for agritech startups in Ethiopia. OCP Africa and Morocco-based Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) have entered into a strategic partnership to start impulse start-up acceleration program to build linkages between corporations and startups using Agritech solutions in Ethiopia.
“Following the success of the Impulse program in Ghana, Nigeria and Ivory Coast, OCP Africa is making a last stop in Ethiopia, to convene with key stakeholders from the agriculture, entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems,” OCP Africa announced in a statement.
Here Is All You Need To Know
The Impulse program is a 12-week acceleration program dedicated to innovative startups in the fields of Agritech, Biotech, Mining tech and Materials Science & Nano Engineering.
Working in partnership with OCP Group, UM6P, Mass Challenge and their ecosystems, Impulse uses an impact-focused model to help entrepreneurs take their startups to the next level.
“The agricultural transformation in Ethiopia represents a unique opportunity for Agritech start-ups,” said Mr. Mehdi Filani, OCP Ethiopia Country Director. “We believe the Impulse start-up acceleration program can add value to develop Ethiopia’s agriculture sector, through innovative technologies,” he said.
Who The Programme Is Targeting
The Impulse program targets start-ups operating in fields related to the value chain of OCP Group and UM6P’s research agenda to help Africa’s agriculture sector increase its productivity in a sustainable manner.
The Impulse program will aim to offer opportunities for startups to accelerate their development including mentoring and coaching, access to potential business opportunities, study trips to the ecosystems of Boston and Lausanne, and a $250,000 cash prize to be shared between winning start-ups on the demo day.
Mr. Adnane Alaoui Soulimani, Impulse Program Director, expressed his enthusiasm about the opportunity to present the Impulse Accelerator to Ethiopian entrepreneurs.
“Impulse can play a significant role in the acceleration of innovative technologies that are transforming agri-businesses and smallholder farming techniques in Ethiopia, a country where over eighty percent of the population is engaged in agriculture,” he said.
What OCP Group Does
OCP Africa is a subsidiary of OCP Group is a leading global provider of phosphate and its derivatives with almost 100 years of experience. Based in Morocco, OCP Africa, was created to work hand-in-hand with farmers to contribute to unlocking Africa’s vast agricultural potential, in 2016.
OCP noted in the statement that it produces fertilizer solutions customized to local conditions and crop needs, and works with partners in many different African governments, non-profits and private enterprises to connect farmers to agricultural services, knowledge and resources they need in order to prosper.
With a presence across the continent, OCP further noted that it understands the diversity and complex needs of Africa’s soils, and is committed to offering the right fertilizer products at the right time, in the right place, at the right price.
OCP Group claims in the statement it is working with the Ethiopian government to jointly develop a USD 3.7 billion fertilizer platform in the country. OCP is currently supplying 100% of Ethiopia’s demand of phosphate fertilizers; granting timely access to high quality and customized fertilizers for Ethiopian farmers.
Beyond the supply of fertilizers, OCP states it is contributing to the transformation of the Ethiopia’s agricultural sector through several programs such as the development of cash crops, horticulture, livestock and blending units.
How to Apply
Interested startups can visit Impulse Start-up Accelerator’s website.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world
This is a huge chance for agritech startups across Nigeria. The FCMB-Wennovation Agritech Incubation Programme, in conjunction with Wennovation Hub, has launched a bid to guide early-stage AgriTech Start-ups across Nigeria so that they can test and validate their ideas as well as gather their first set of customers or pivot if need be.
This will be done through a combination of financial support, guidance, and training. The secondary objective is to prepare these start-ups for acceleration.
Here Is All You Need To Know
The goal of the 2019 incubation is to:
Expose 10 teams across Nigeria to the root of the pre-defined problem statement by merging an in-depth problem definition strategy with an immersion process.
Support at least top 10 teams with a demonstrable Minimum Viable Product to build a sustainable business model by taking them through a design thinking workshop and subsequently a 3 weeks incubation program.
Support at least tops 2 Agritech startups in Nigeria with seed investments and grants.
Offer access to experienced mentors and a cohort structure that encourages peer learning and support.
Provide opportunities to connect with potential customers and investors.
What Are Expected of Prospective Applicants
Applications should focus on four problem statements, namely Input, Production, Processing and Storage, and Marketing and Sales, with Wennovation Hub looking for MVP-stage startups with some form of market validation.
The programme commences with a one-week immersion component where selected startups get to interact with community members through Wennovation Hub immersion partners. Startups who successfully complete the immersion programme and the required reporting commitments will be invited to a two-week Bootcamp in Lagos.
It all concludes with a demo day in September, with all successful startups to be taken into a six-month post-Bootcamp aftercare programme
At the end of calls for application, 10 Agritech start-ups will be selected for the incubation program.
The program will be concluded with a pitching competition at the demo day where 2 Agritech startups will win a total of N3million in Grants.
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.
Kenyan agritech startup Taimba has joined the league of African startup fundraisers. US impact investor Gray Matters Capital is committing $100 000 in the Nairobi-based B2B agritech startup to help it scale its operations.
Here Is The Deal
The investment from Gray Matters Capital was made through its gender lens early-stage fund GMC coLabs.
The startup explained that the markets it wants to take on in Nairobi are Umoja, Kayole, Pipeline/Imara Daima, Kawagware/Waiyaki way, Kahawa west/Githurai, and Southlands/Langata.
Last year, Taimba was one of 15 startups selected to join the Make-IT accelerator.
The startup also emerged the winner of the inaugural Disrupt Africa Live Pitch Competition which was held in Nairobi last year. Taimba also won $10 000 at the 2018 Food+City Challenge Prize at SXSW.
The deal also marks GMC coLabs fourth investment in Africam with investment ticket sizes of up to $250 000. The impact investor’s other investees include Rwanda’s African Renewal Energy Distributor (ARED), Ghana’s Redbird Health Tech and Nigeria’s Sonocare.
In addition, the investor has also supported two other start-ups from the continent — Kenya’s parent advisory turned e-commerce start-up MumsVillageand Sierra Leone based Mosabi as part of its global digital accelerator program — GMC Calibrator earlier this year.
A Look At Taimba
Taimba is a mobile-based platform that connects rural small scale farmers to urban retailers, restaurants, hospitals, and schools in Nairobi.
The startup was founded in 2017 by Dominique Kavuisya and Joan Kavuisya
Taimba aims to remove middlemen, shrink the agricultural value chain, cut wastage and make products more affordable.
Gray Matters Capital said the startup currently works with 2000 farmers as well as 15 farmer savings and credit co-operatives that sell products that include potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, and carrots.
Informal greengrocers make up the bulk of Taimba’s 310 customers at 85%, this while restaurants and cafes make up 10% of its customer list, with schools and hospitals located outside of Nairobi making up 5% of its clientele.
“The funding is a shot in the arm for us to strengthen our warehouse infrastructure by setting up cold storage facilities and also our delivery logistics so that we can cater to six new markets within Nairobi,” noted Taimba’s CEO Kavuisya.
Outside of Nairobi, Taimba is planning to launch a pilot in Mombasa and Kisumu City by next year. In addition, the startup is also looking to produce new products that include fruits, nuts, and eggs as part of its farm product catalogue.
The startup also has plans to replicate its model in Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda over the next five years.
GMC coLabs portfolio manager Jennifer Soltis said Taimba has built a solution that can be replicated in other markets in East Africa “with minimal tweaks”.
The startup’s first deal which was signed last month marks Taimba’s first investment. The company currently employs a team of seven permanent staff and five part-time workers.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.
