GIZ-SAIS Investment Readiness Program for African AgriTech and FoodTech Startups
‘Scaling Digital Agriculture Innovations through Startups’ (SAIS) is a project implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). In an effort to support African AgriTech and FoodTech startups, BMZ, through the GIZ-SAIS program, has launched the Investment Readiness Program (IRP) to help rapidly scale and improve promising initiatives, while impacting farmers positively on the ground. eProd Solutions has participated as one of the eight promising African ICT start-ups and participated in the program. “The selected startups will be able to scale their innovations in new markets and help their users to improve their incomes.” states Michel Bernhardt, Head of the SAIS project.
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Digital solutions for Supply Chain Management in the agricultural sector are more important than ever, especially now COVID-19 is making it even more difficult to source from small scale farmers. In collaboration with eProd Solutions the Africa Agribusiness Academy organizes a webinar to demonstrate practically various features of the eProd ERP platform. During a two hour webinar some of the topics covered will be: farmer and field registration (including capturing field GPS locations), field inspections, loan management (including credit scoring and automated repayment via product deliveries), produce collection, quality-based payment and produce traceability, reporting and M&E activities, communication with the farmers including automated weather forecast and production advise.
“The eProd team identified several key constraints that basically cripple field activities for the buyers from small scale producers in Africa”, according to Miss Erna Goudt, Client Relationship Manager at eProd Solutions, and speaker at the ICT4D webinar series. Due to the current crisis it has indeed become exceedingly difficult to conduct basic field operations, such as to register farmers and their fields. eProd can assist to collect farmer group, farmer and field profiles, field inspections, manage produce collections via local field staff and lead farmers. Secondly, gathering reliable data to monitor the field production via field inspections and survey data from farmers, has become very difficult and companies are in the dark regarding crop status and projecting yields. Thirdly, communicating with farmers has stopped or at least significantly reduced while the current situation requires continuation of extension services, sharing market price information, and updates on COVID-19 awareness. Fourth, following up on the buyers’ field staff’s activities is even more difficult than ever before. How to verify movements, accomplishments, etc? Finally, and probably the most criplling factor, there is lack of cash liquidity in the field for farmers to invest in field activities, farming inputs, etc. On one hand many buyers are not able to pay farners remotely via mobile money transfer or bank acocunt, and farmers can’t link up with financial institutions or can’t be checked for credit worthiness. How would buyers share credit risk information with financial institutions, automated loan repayment, tri-partite agreements, manage their input inventories without appropriate and affordable tools. Please participate in the upcoming webinar, part of the virtual edition of the ICT4D Conference and ongoing ICT4D webinar series, you will hear about low cost digital and mobile technologies to support farmers under these unprecedented circumstances.
The current health crisis is turning into an economic crisis and food adulterations are at risk. The importance of food safety is easily pushed to the background when food security becomes an issue. “With all the additional challenges during the COVID-19 the ‘invisible hand of the market’ is more important than ever and only a Market Systems Development approach can guarantee aggregating the required volumes of quality products for traders and food processors”, says 