Crusoe Osagie
Cellulant has launched a report highlighting the impact of technology in transforming agriculture across Africa particularly with the “Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GES) Dry Season, 2016.” The report highlighted key progress on food security and financial inclusion for farmers across 30 states in Nigeria.
The programme, which set out to service 500,000 farmer-households in four value chains, accomplished 92 per cent of the targeted subsidised service, but as a result on-boarded an additional 200,000 farmers into a financial support platform. 400 Agribusinesses and more than 1000 jobs were created as a result of the programme.
The report also highlighted the effects of technology on agriculture as well as projections for the industry.
Since 2011, by the use of technology, governments have been able to eliminate corruption, promote transparency and transform the Agricultural sector; In Nigeria where there is a clear disconnect between Broad Street (Financial sector) and Main Street (our inner cities and rural areas), interventions like GES become very important when it comes to the creation of real growth in the economy; With the dry season program impacting more than 350,000 farmers, enough food will be produced to feed roughly 120M Nigerians for two months; In 2017, private sectors and financial partners will begin to test pilot the injection of loans into the system; Messer Cellulant, has arranged the consortium of financial sector actors who have agreed to deploy a loan book portfolio of $100 million into smallholder farmers’ micro loans.
The goal is to achieve 1,736,445 farmers borrowing between June 2017, to July, 2018.
This transformation was made possible by the Agrikore platform also known as the “e-wallet” platform. Agrikore was developed by Cellulant for Nigeria in 2012. The Agrikore platform at its core, provides the tools for the creation of a structured agribusiness economy (agriconomy). The platform provides value for users which includes ensuring a start to end management of interventions (schemes), providing visibility of the cashflow movements within the schemes, enabling the management of accounts, executing payment and reconciliation processes, as well as enabling start and end to end management of services, products catalogue and inventories.
Liberia is the first country outside of Nigeria to have adopted and implemented the Agrikore platform and all its elements fully. Other countries such as Togo and Malawi are in advanced stages of replicating this system. Governments from the Middle East have also indicated interest in the implementation of the platform.
