The facilities are being made available by the Pan African Savings and Loans Limited in partnership with AgroCenta, under their Financial Inclusion for Small Holder Farmers in Africa Project (FISFAP) and Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)

AgroCenta Competitors

Founded in 2016, AgroCenta operates two integrated digital platforms in Ghana, CropChain and LendIt, to help address challenges related to smallholder farmers’ access to markets and financial services.

AgroCenta is currently operating in 3 out of 10 regions in Ghana. Our expansion plans are to rollout the platform in the remaining 7 regions of Ghana by end of 2018 and sign up a total of 70,000 smallholder farmers to connect them directly to a market to trade and eliminate exploitative buying. Also AgroCenta plans to scale into immediate countries in West Africa (Ivory Coast & Nigeria) by end of 2020. The long-term goal of AgroCenta is to create the first of its kind commodity exchange and aggregations platform in sub Saharan Africa.

This funding, secured from UK charity Shell Foundation, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), AV Ventures and Rabo Foundation, will enable AgroCenta to further develop its smallholder farmer inclusion programmes and procure crops at transparent and fair market prices to service offtake contracts.

In addition, lacking adequate infrastructure, logistics and transportation also limits their access to larger urban markets, where they could obtain much better pricing for their crops. Furthermore, the lack of basic data that enables KYC (Know Your Customer) and a limited or non-existent credit history means that smallholders have very limited access to finance. This prevents them from being able to utilise all of their land for growing crops or forces them to resort to using lower quality inputs — leading to stagnation at the bottom of the pyramid.

Agriculture accounts for circa. 17% of Ghana’s GDP. Through its outreach and services, AgroCenta has increased crop yields of farmers by 40% thereby contributing to Ghana’s economy at large.

Agrocenta aims to create livelihood empowerement for smallholder farmers, help increase farmers’ incomes and thus help reducing poverty. Agrocenta aims to help ensure sustainable food security by working to reduce inefficiencies in the agricultural value chain. Agrocenta also aims to contribute towards gender equality by working with many female farmers.

lack of access to structured markets, which leaves them at the mercy of predatory brokers or middlemen who buy at exploitative prices, and lack of access to finance, which means they may never move beyond smallholder farming to middle-level or even commercial farming.

We identified a missing gap in the value chain that was the capacity to access the market for smallholder farmers after they have successfully cultivated their commodities. Access to the market was a huge problem for millions of smallholder farmers.

AgroCenta’s core services are

Hello Paisa’s solution to the problem is its easy-to-use money remittance app that enables customers to send cash to countries across the world in a manner that is affordable, fast and safe. With the Hello Paisa app, all you need is an active account and your mobile phone to easily create a transaction and send money home instantly.The high cost of data, however, remains a factor that prevents many customers from accessing the app.The solution: WhatsApp Business API. By using the WhatsApp Business solution, Hello Paisa customers can now initiate transactions via WhatsApp, thus taking a ground-breaking step into conversational commerce!From the comfort of an already utilised platform, Hello Paisa customers can now conveniently, easily and cost-effectively initiate transactions, obtain exchange rates, view transaction history, create or delete a recipient, and refer a friend.

This partnership enables Hello Paisa customers to send money from South Africa to their family and loved ones for pay-out into billions of bank accounts in more than 100 countries, millions of wallets in a dozen countries or to Western Union’s retail network across 200 countries and territories.

The solution is a catalyst to reduce the operational costs while increasing operational efficiencies. Whether credit providers are seeking to better minimize their credit risk exposure, digitize their loan application processes, or streamline their new client outreach, the FarmDrive platform allows them to do so by using world-class algorithms, modern technology, and an immense amount of data captured by the solution interfaces.

FarmDrive (FD), a Kenyan startup set to unlock millions of dollars in loans for smallholder farmers in Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa, received a follow-on investment from EWB Canada last month, with participation from AK IMPACT INVESTORS, 1 to 4 Foundation, ADAP SEED FUND 2 and The Lakes Charitable Foundation.

But if it’s true that Kenya’s relative stability has contributed to Bosire and Kimani’s success, it’s also true—and typical of the Kenyan entrepreneurial experience—that FarmDrive has succeeded with little encouragement from the national government. In sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya and Nigeria have achieved tech preeminence more from venture capital flowing into those large countries than from government action.