Friday, 29th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

Cellulant’s Agrikore: Tapping into Africa’s Agrictech market

By Gbenga Akinfenwa
21 July 2019   |   3:50 am
Cellulant’s Agrikore platform – an online marketplace for smallholder farmers, agricultural input and produce traders is tapping into Africa’s emerging Agritech market valued at €5.3b, according to a new report by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and Dalberg Advisors.

Cellulant’s Agrikore platform – an online marketplace for smallholder farmers, agricultural input and produce traders is tapping into Africa’s emerging Agritech market valued at €5.3b, according to a new report by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and Dalberg Advisors.
 
The State of Digitalisation of Agriculture in Africa 2019 report identifies online marketplace solutions such as Agrikore as significant example of how digital tools are being built to tackle major challenges of attracting and retaining buyers and sellers, and to solve the problem of inefficient and fragmented agricultural markets.
 
The Agriculture market in Africa is projected to grow to $1tr by 2030. The report also identified Cellulant as being among only 390 active Digitalisation for Agriculture (D4Ag) solution providers that are working across the continent and have the potential to not only support agricultural transformation, but also ability to do so sustainably and inclusively. The report presents evidence on how these enterprises have proven that digital tools can improve market efficiency, transparency, aggregation and integration.
 
Speaking on the finding, Cellulant co-CEO, Bolaji Akinboro, said: “technology is at the heart of transformation in Africa. We believe by innovating around how supply and demand are organised, we can solve Africa’s food crisis. We are scaling up our existing payments products in the agriculture sector, this will allow us to increase access to payments for the millions of farmers who are still unbanked, despite the financial inclusion revolution.”
 
Unlike many of the D4Ag solution providers studied in the report, Cellulant’s Agrikore solution was noted to be one of the few marketplace players that are focusing on digitising at both the input and produce stages by linking all the players in agriculture at the input level (farmers, agro-dealers, financial institutions, governments, development partners) and at produce level
(FMCG, produce aggregators).
 
The report noted that the bundling of digitally enabled Agritech solutions was gaining popularity with some enterprises incorporating either third party or proprietary payment solutions. The report cites the use of Cellulant’s Tingg payments platform, which powers Agrikore, as an example.

0 Comments