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 €5.3 billion, 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 in how digital tools are being built to tackle major challenges of attracting and retaining a good number of buyers and sellers, thereby helping to solve the problem of inefficient and fragmented agricultural markets.
According to the report, the agriculture market in Africa, projected to grow to $1 trillion by 2030, continues to be a catalyst of sustainable development for enhanced food security, reduction of poverty and the overall growth of the continent’s economy. Technologies such as mobile telephony or blockchain have become enablers that can be used to solve some of the challenges plaguing the sector.
The report also identified Cellulant as being among 390 active Digitalisation for Agriculture (D4Ag) solution providers working across the continent and have the potential to not only support agricultural transformation but also the 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 this finding, Cellulant co-CEO, Bolaji Akinboro, stated that, “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 several D4Ag solution providers studied in the report, Cellulant’s Agrikore solution was noted to be one of the few marketplace players 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).