Farmer, Khalil Dukuly, is Founding Partner at Doukoure et Karrat SARL. And after a bountiful harvest of watermelons, with very few off-takers, he laments:
They say Liberians are lazy; they don’t farm. In contrast, we have produced premium-quality watermelons with international standards, yet we struggle to sell them in Monrovia.
Supermarkets, Restaurants, and Hotels would only take 5 to 20 pieces. Thank you, Harbel Supermarket, for taking 100 pieces. We have about 3000 pieces. We are currently distributing it to market women.
One problem, several solutions
There are many different approaches and practices when it comes to farming, but one thing is constant – to run a farm as a business, products need to be sold. And to sell, a farmer must be visible to buyers, while buyers should have easy access to producers.
This was the one of the problems USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service encountered in West Africa and East Africa. Across both regions, smallholder farmers and buyers have struggled to match and get goods sold, resulting in food waste and lost opportunities for small farming communities.
To help solve this market problem, FAS turned to an innovative US-based technology company called Agromovil whose agtech platform helps buyers and sellers connect. This new tool received great feedback from farmers in Ghana and Tanzania. Since the full launch of Agromovil in both countries in 2022, more than 1,600 farmers and buyers have signed up, resulting in more than $3.5 million of agricultural sales. [Full story here – Aleksey Minchenkov/ USDA]
A bright idea from Nigeria
To solve the problem that smallholder farmers face in terms of lack of direct access to markets, Ifeoluwa Olatayo founded Soupah Farm-en-Market Limited, an e-marketplace that connects rural small-scale farmers to large off-takers with end-to-end supply chain traceability.
Olatayo’s agritech solution earned her the Agriculture Youth and Technology (AYuTe) Challenge grand prize of $10,000. Her MartX product is aptly described as ‘The Seed to Sale Station’, promising speedy trades, instant payments, and support services.
She says:
“We connect rural smallholder farmers to urban markets by using a simple USSD short code as a procurement interface. So majorly, we’re improving the livelihoods of the smallholder farmers by giving them added profit, instead of just allowing them to sell the products cheaply to the middlemen. We buy from them at better prices, about 50 percent higher than the typical traditional market,”