Two weeks after becoming a group, Farmcrowdy has officially launched a new subsidiary, Farmgate Africa: a technology-driven agro-trading market place for agriculture commodities in Africa.
The initiative behind Farmgate Africa is to close the gap between farmers and produce-buyers. This will help build and foster relationships between the consumers and farmers by allowing major processors to place orders through the Farmgate Africa 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 agent.
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.
“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%.”
Kenneth Obiajulu, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Farmgate Africa
In a bid to deploy funds across various market points, FarmGate hopes to lean on FarmCrowdy’s well-established platform; allowing Nigerians to be part of the funding process of buying and selling what farmers already harvested. This will also give every farmer that has produced high quality farm produce, the opportunity to sell to major buyers through Farmgate Africa’s website.
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”.
Akumah also stated FarmGate is the first of several subsidiaries to be launched by the FarmCrowdy Group, with the next to be launched in May. He also mentioned that other announcements will be made in June and July. Each subsidiary will be run by a team a Director.
