Articles
Impact Stories
For farming fortune, dial mAgri
A Botswanan start-up is breaking the barriers to digital technologies for rural smallholder farmers. Brastorne Enterprises, a winner of CTA’s 2016 Pitch AgriHack competition, operates a mobile platform called mAgri to improve farmers’ access to information, markets and finance.
Read MoreLovin Kobusingye, the accidental entrepreneur
Sharing actionable knowledge helps to turn ideas into reality. The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has seen powerful returns from bringing together young entrepreneurial thinkers and doers from all over Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
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Blog articles
Have agribusiness idea, but no money? Be inventive!
So you have what you are convinced is a winning idea for an agri start-up. But what about the funding? They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and young agripreneurs reveal there is no one single model when it comes to finding the money to get a business plan up and running.
Read MoreKenyan youth groups selected for a new agribusiness development project
by Hermann Tossou and George Mazuri
The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation’s (CTA) joint project with the USTADI Foundation – Youth Economic Empowerment through Agribusiness in Kenya (Vijabiz) – has selected 166 youth groups to receive capacity building and financial support. The membership of the selected youth groups total 2,373 young farmers, who will be the beneficiaries of the project being implemented in Kilifi and Nakuru counties in Kenya between 2018 and 2020.
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Guarantee funds unlock finance for agri-entrepreneurship in West Africa
by Marnie Pannatier
Timely completion of field preparation and grain harvesting is a major challenge for rice farmers across sub-Saharan Africa. A new business model led by young people is providing mechanised services to farmers for activities such as soil preparation and harvesting, helping them to intensify production and improve their income as a result.
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Where passion is profitable - why agripreneurship is so rewarding
by Busani Bafana and Nawsheen Hosenally
Young, imaginative, resourceful and risk-loving defines a growing band of young entrepreneurs in the business of farming. Unlike their parents and grandparents, whose work in agriculture was often one of drudgery and poverty, the new generation farmers and agripreneurs love what they do.
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Why expanding value chain access is important for young agripreneurs
by Michael Sudarkasa
When engaging with youth agripreneurs in Africa on the challenges they face, access to finance emerges as a key concern. Closer scrutiny of their business models generally reveals that young entrepreneurs are often not deemed creditworthy, or suitable for investment, primarily because they lack consistent and deep access to their perceived target markets. In short, their order books are lean and their access to markets is limited.
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Background articles
Offering ICT solutions to meet the specific needs of Ivorian farmers
In Côte d’Ivoire, ICT4DEV, the best Ivorian start-up at Pitch AgriHack 2017, has developed mobile applications to meet the needs of local farmers.
Read MoreDeveloping a winning strategy
The rapid evolution of ICTs is providing new opportunities for young entrepreneurs in agriculture. However, there are many hurdles to be overcome before these fledgling agribusinesses become profitable.
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News articles
Young women take the lead in Pitch AgriHack
Since the launch of CTA’s Pitch AgriHack Talent Initiative in 2013, over 1 million farmers and agricultural stakeholders have benefited from services provided by start-up companies involved in its annual competitions. Their ICT-based innovations have helped to raise more than €2 million from investors and development specialists.
Read MorePromoting Youth Employment in the Rice Value Chain
In many West African countries, the lack of employment opportunities in rural areas has led to an exodus of young people, both to major cities in the region and to Europe. This is a serious loss, as the young offer a potentially dynamic labour force at a time when the agricultural sector is desperately short of workers.
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Empowering the Young through Agribusiness
Agriculture is the mainstay of Kenya’s economy, employing more than 70% of people in rural areas and contributing 26% of the GDP. However, youth unemployment in the countryside, as well as in the cities, is growing. Some 30% of Kenyans between the age of 20 and 24 are currently out of work. Increasing youth employment in agriculture could do much to address this problem, and it is one of the main aims of CTA’s ‘Youth Economic Empowerment through Agribusiness in Kenya’ (VijaBiz) project.
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Bottling Mali’s wild plants for nutritious drinks
In 2016, Aïssata Diakité launched Zabbaan Holding – a company that makes juices from plants grown locally in central Mali by over 5,000 farmers.
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An entrepreneur must be competitive and creative, but above all, open-minded
At the age of just 24, Madagascan Heritiaina Randriamananatahina heads up a cheese and syrup processing business that is growing fast. Lacking any formal qualifications, he discusses the barriers facing any aspiring young business man or woman in the agri-food industry.
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Interviews
Online platform improves the livelihood of small farmers in Ghana
Michael Ocansey, a computer science specialist, and Francis Obirikorang, a chemical engineer, developed the online platform, AgroCenta, won CTA’s 2017 Pitch AgriHack initiative, which gives youth entrepreneurs an opportunity to develop their business services and accelerate the adoption of their services. In an interview with CTA, Ocansey talks about AgroCenta – which links small-scale farmers and farmer organisations in Ghana with a big online market to improve the prices they receive for their commodities.
Read MoreA business has to be social
Martin Stimela, co-founder of Brastorne Enterprises, which provides ICT solutions for African agriculture, shares his insights on some of the core components that make up a successful business model.
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Karim Sy: ‘We cannot think Africa without agriculture’
Forty-six-year-old Karim Sy rejects the label of ‘incubator’, preferring to describe himself as a ‘serial entrepreneur’. Nevertheless, Jokkolabs, his non-profit organisation set up in Senegal in 2010, now has 12 hubs spread in Africa and Europe, and is trying to uncover the African entrepreneurs of tomorrow. Recently appointed to the Presidential Council for Africa by French President Emmanuel Macron, Sy has also been working for several years with the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) through the AgriHack programme.
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e-Agribusiness: A vital resource for Togo’s agriculture sector
Back in March 2015, Togolese entrepreneur Edeh Dona Etchri launched the e-Agribusiness platform to connect people and organisations across the country’s agriculture sector. It has proved a vital source of information for otherwise isolated farmers and is helping to grow the sector nationwide. The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) worked with the founder to help him expand and market his business. Today, there are around 6,000 farmers across Togo using the platform.
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Scientific Articles
Young agripreneurs create markets for farmers in the Congo
To encourage value addition of cassava and provide employment opportunities for local farmers, women and youths in the Democratic Republic of Congo, young entrepreneurs have established eight processing centres across the country.
Read MoreA passion for porcine production
Accounting for 38% of worldwide meat production, pork is attracting a new generation of African entrepreneurs – bucking the continent’s traditional aversion to the meat.
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Ismaël Tanko turning tomato into red gold
Ismaël Tanko, a 33-year-old entrepreneur, has created a fast-growing company whose tomato purees are already on sale in several West African countries. The next step is a more industrialised production line and an increased number of sales channels.
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Don’t leave technology to the men
Dr Eleni Gabre-Madhin, CEO and Founder of blueMoon – Ethiopia’s first youth agribusiness incubator – shares her experience as a woman entrepreneur in Africa’s agricultural sector and stresses the importance that agribusinesses ‘think digital’.
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Home-grown ICT solutions in agriculture come from young entrepreneurs
Young innovators in Africa, the Caribbean, and Pacific region, have recognised the need for creative solutions to raise agricultural productivity and the huge prospective market for their ICT-enabled services in agriculture. Although they still face many challenges, their products have the potential to transform agricultural value chains in developing countries.
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