…Funding the growth of market-access for farmers and buyers starting with Nigeria
BY: Sandra Ani
Farmcrowdy Group (FCG), has officially launched a new subsidiary, Farmgate Africa, a technology-driven agro-trading market place for agriculture commodities in Africa.
Led by Kenneth Obiajulu, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Farmgate Africa is bridging the gap between rural farmers and the market place by providing major processors and international buyers the opportunity to purchase commodities directly from local farming clusters through technology.
As part of bridging the gap in the agriculture value chain caused by market access, the Farmgate Africa platform also serves the purpose of building relationships with local farmers and enabling major processors to place orders through the platform without having to go through various layers of intermediaries. In addition, it helps with aggregating the commodities from smallholder farmers while paying attention to the unique specifications of the buyers for specific produce and ensuring the delivery of the commodity to major processors or the international buyer’s agents.
Obiajulu says, “Our business model is one that brings the farmers closer to the processors and off-takers by eliminating several layers of intermediaries. By doing this, Farmgate optimizes market access to African farmers and also improves their income by at least 30%.”
Leaning on the wealth of experience and operational expertise provided by the Farmcrowdy Group, Farmgate Africa, will over the next two years, focus on deploying funds across various market points. This will focus on beef processing and developing aggregation capacities across maize, soybean, sorghum and dried-split ginger for markets across Nigeria, UAE and UK.
Onyeka Akumah, Founder and CEO of Farmcrowdy Group says, “launching Farmgate Africa as one of the subsidiaries in the Farmcrowdy Group gives us huge joy with the expectations placed on us to continue to innovate and build new solutions driven by technology to finance agriculture. We have received a lot of feedback from farmers and major agro buyers who need to fund market access to agro-commodities but are constantly held back because the market place is unstructured.
“Farmgate Africa is our response to this need. As we launch Farmgate Africa today, we have tirelessly worked for the past 6 months with the team to build relationships with blue-chip companies in and outside Nigeria, extend our relationships with thousands of farmer networks across the country and now, we are set to launch to the market with a strong team behind the idea”.
Farmgate Africa will allow every day Nigerians fund the process of buying and selling what farmers have already harvested. This will give every farmer that has produced high quality farm produce, the opportunity to sell to major buyers through Farmgate Africa’s website.