Uka Eje, the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of ThriveAgric, an agricultural technology company providing access to finance, premium markets and data-driven advisory for smallholder farmers, in this interview by NURUDEEN ALIMI, shares in detail how the company has empowered over 500,000 farmers across Nigeria, among others:
How has ThriveAgric been able to help smallholder farmers to enhance food security?
Over the last five years, ThriveAgric has been able to empower well over 500,000 smallholder farmers with input financing, data-driven advisory and access to premium local and global markets.
More so, we have significantly deployed modern technology to assist these farmers double their yield and triple their income. Our proprietary technology – the Agricultural Operating System (AOS), has been the game changer as it has improved our services to farmers, enabling transparency and building the required visibility required to promote food security for Africa and the world.
Financing is a major challenge for agricultural development. As a company leveraging technology to empower farmers, what are the challenges?
Unfortunately so! Some of the major challenges we’ve been able to profile along the lines of agric financing include the reluctance of financial institutions to provide adequate credit facilities to agribusiness particularly due to the risk involved.
Another challenge is the lack of a suitable financing model that is tailored towards meeting financing needs of the agriculture sector which is largely debt based.
Interestingly, we have not just discovered these challenges, but also put in efforts to mitigate them over the years. One of such ways was the introduction of technology across all our operations to foster transparency and credibility for investor confidence. With the visibility that this has afforded us, we’ve been able to switch to an institutional funding model which is most suitable for agriculture and has enabled us to scale our operations.
How has ThriveAgric been able to mobilise smallholder farmers to get more food storage?
Food storage is pivotal to the growth and sustainability of the agro value chain as it plays a critical role in ensuring food security, reducing food waste, and promoting economic stability.
We’ve built over 500 warehouse facilities across various touch points and this has enabled us to provide storage services to farmers over a longer period of time, reducing post-harvest losses.
We have also built an Inventory Management System (IMS), an app that runs on our AOS and this helps to track inventory of commodities upon harvest, the condition of grains stored including temperature and humidity levels.
Ultimately, with our network of premium offtakers who are also food processors across the value chain, our farmers are able to get competitive prices for their commodities, hence the need for them to embrace our solutions end-to-end.
You have over 500,000 farmers onboard your programme, what does this translate to in terms of food surplus?
Ending the year 2022 with over 500,000 smallholder farmers in our network is a huge milestone for us. This is a testament to the efforts we’re putting in to ensure that Africa is able to feed itself and the world. With these farmers, we’ve produced 1,500,000+ metric tonnes of grains and we plan to double this in the coming year.
So far, this has translated to ThriveAgric now growing over 5% of the national demand for maize Nigeria in fulfilment of our vision to build an Africa that feeds herself and the world.
Why has it been difficult for Nigeria to adequately feed its citizens?
We believe that Nigeria has the express potential to feed its citizens and much more, cater to the needs of neighbouring African regions and this capacity lies largely on smallholder farmers who produce over 80% of the continent’s food demand.
One of the major challenges has however been the lack of funding for these farmers who are key players in the value chain. The more we see more tailored funding aimed at empowering them, we’ll keep seeing them breaking the barriers and exploring their full production potential.
The impact of middlemen has also posed a difficult challenge in the value chain, making it difficult for these key players to access the right market to get the right value for their commodities, which hampers their production capacity and of course results in minimal yield.
ThriveAgric identifies all this fragmentation and strives to engage sustainable mechanisms leveraging technology to address them and ensure food security for all.
Overall, the agriculture sector is a growing one and we hope to see more players come into the space to replicate ThriveAgric’s efforts with hand-on operations and we believe this will further strengthen local production to address the food shortage.
What is ThriveAgric doing to help the country in ensuring adequacy and employment opportunities?
Our operations at ThriveAgric are largely impact-based. With our intervention, our farmers now double their yield and triple their income, making it possible for them to comfortably fend for their households and provide quality education for their children.
In addition, we’ve provided over 3,000 employment opportunities for young people who are our field extension workers deploying the various technology products we leverage to empower our farmers.
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