80% of all food consumed in Nigeria is produced by 64 Million smallholder farmers, who have little proof to show for their labor due to poor yield resulting from limited information, and wrong operational approaches. The average farmer relies on guess work to make their operational decisions and can’t access funding to acquire quality inputs that can help them increase crop yields and to help them improve their standards of living.
This is where Kitovu – Nigeria’s leading Ag-Tech Startup building climate smart farms and post harvest infrastructure for next generation comes in. They help farmers by providing them with personalized agronomic advisory, and regular crop health audits that enables them to increase productivity and earn better incomes from their farms. In addition, these farmers have access to quality inputs, markets, financing, and post harvest infrastructure to make their work easier.
Here is how they help:
The first line of action is to first collect the data of these farmers, their farms and crops, collecting details like geo-location data. These data are combined with satellite information and processed to give a precise agronomic advisory, inputs recommendation and crop health audits throughout the lifecycle of specific crops.
At harvest, the Kitovu platform provides access to markets for the farmers to sell their harvests effortlessly and at better prices through an e-procure service. Farmers can also decide to store their produce in Kitovu’s Storage infrastructure so as to earn more through market price appreciation. The great thing that stands the Kitovu platform out, apart from the personalised agronomic advisory and the end to end experience it provides the farmers, is that the farmers don’t have to pay for any of these services upfront.
So far, the Kitovu team led by Nwachinemere Emeka have served over 12,000 smallholder farmers, generating over $230K in revenue to date. They are working to build a resilient food system for the African agriculture sector, where farmers can earn a decent income from their work.
They are raising $500k in debt and $500k in equity, and they plan to channel this into product development, sales and marketing, and a very unique Buy Now Pay Later input financing program. This financing would enable them to empower 50,000 more smallholder farmers. Feel free to reach out to them at https://kitovu.com.ng/, to transform the African agriculture sector, one smallholder farmer at a time.
