Innovate4Agriculture: Bringing together start-ups and agri-businesses in Uganda to speed digital services to rural areas and accelerate innovative solutions

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March 04, 2019
Kampala, Uganda

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UNCDF launched its engagement in the agricultural sector with an innovation challenge called Innovate4Agriculture bringing together actors from the agricultural sector and digital innovators who had minimum viable products to offer

Through its MM4P programme, the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) has worked to digitise various aspects of agricultural value chains in Uganda since 2015. The effort is consistent with the programme’s focus on improving the financial lives of vulnerable populations—especially rural people—and thus has concentrated on the digitisation of payments to smallholder farmers.

While understanding and overcoming the obstacles that these farmers face are undoubtedly critical to the digitisation effort, UNCDF recognises that other actors in these agricultural value chains also face significant challenges and could benefit significantly from digital solutions.

UNCDF therefore also addresses the operational issues that private-sector companies confront when attempting to serve rural constituents—problems that affect productivity, efficiency and ultimately revenue.

In particular, UNCDF is engaging with various stakeholders in Ugandan agricultural value chains to do the following:

Support start-ups to develop relevant digital solutions for the market.
Support sector partners to access affordable, customised and relevant digital solutions to their challenges.
Help build the capacity of local innovation hubs by improving their incubation and acceleration process, mentorship curriculum and content, to benefit the start-up ecosystem.

Uganda benefits from an array of start-ups that are involved in digital innovation. Most, however, struggle to (1) understand the real challenges facing customers (farmers and other actors in the value chains), which has led to misaligned solutions that ultimately fail; and (2) pilot test their innovations with reputable, experienced partner organizations, which has meant a lack of iteration/fine-tuning that is a necessary step to ensuring that the solutions match market needs.

Meanwhile, small, medium and large actors in the Ugandan agricultural sector grapple to (1) understand what digital solutions can do for them and how to approach digital solution providers; (2) cover the development cost of digital solutions; and (3) mitigate the risk of working with start-ups for the first time.

UNCDF launched its engagement in this area with an innovation challenge called ‘Innovate4Agriculture.’ It brought together, on one side, large actors in the agricultural sector (agri-businesses and non-governmental organizations) who faced specific problems that could be solved with digital solutions and, on the other side, digital innovators (pre-seed stage or legally established start-ups) who had minimum viable products to offer.

The idea was to bring them together to address three specific challenges:

Building a farmer loyalty programme.
Improving the management of agricultural value chains.
Enabling access of farmers to agricultural extension workers, tools and equipment.

The project has three phases: a boot camp, an acceleration programme and a pilot for the emerging solutions. For the boot camp, a call for applications resulted in 50 start-ups applying to take part in the innovation challenge. Of these, 30 were selected to participate in the three-day boot camp. It took place 1–3 February 2019 at the Innovation Village, located in the capital city of Kampala. From those, ten are undergoing a three-month accelerator programme in partnership with three agricultural sector partners that UNCDF selected:

National Union of Coffee Agribusinesses and Farm Entreprises (NUCAFE).
Mukwano Industries (AK Oils and Fats Ltd), specifically for its business in the seed-oil value chain.
Welthungerhilfe, a large German private-aid organization.

The ten solutions that emerged from the boot camp and that are now undergoing acceleration are the following, organised under the challenge that they are addressing:

Challenge #1: Building a farmer loyalty programme

Oriems Cloud is an Internet-based platform providing a software-as-a-service solution for businesses that require easy, affordable and quality systems accessible from anywhere to manage their operations and store their data securely. Oriems Cloud provides a customer loyalty platform with features for on-line and off-line interactions with clients, NFC card for offline access, USSD and APK access, and various loyalty strategies aimed at different client segments.

WindWood Millers and thinVoid offer a farmer loyalty card to ease the identification of farmers, by registering farmers and logging their biodata, language preference, location and other economic activities. In addition, it enables monitoring of farmer activity, farmer financing through partners, and fraud prevention by issuing electronic and physical receipts for mobile money.

Smart farming is an all agro-inputs e-commerce marketplace that protects Ugandan farmers from counterfeit agro-inputs by marketing and distributing only certified agro-inputs from certified and trusted suppliers/manufacturers in Uganda through an online e-commerce platform and physical stores. In addition to the agro-inputs e-commerce marketplace, Smart farming also provides other solutions, including a Smart farmer’s card, which aim to make farming safe, convenient and more productive.

Challenge #2: Improving the management of the coffee value chain

Hamwe offers the M-Farmer (m-farmer.org) app, which is designed to extend the benefits of technology to agricultural value chains where different actors (including farmers, traders, processors, and consumers) can build better records, increase the efficiency of operations and make informed decisions. M-Farmer functionality includes farmer profiling and registration, collections, check-off system, mobile payments, supplier module, e-extension, farm monitoring, order management, farmer app, and traceability.

Metajua is a farmer-relation and supply-chain management platform in Eastern and Southern Africa, whose clients collectively buy over 100 metric tons of product from small farmers a day. Metajua democratizes technology for cooperatives, small and medium enterprises, as well as larger businesses, creating innovative products that enable customers to better interact with farmers and that facilitate farmers’ financial inclusion and stakeholders’ value from increased supply-chain efficiency. The Metajua solution implements an externally verified value chain, provides accessibility via mobile and web interface and enhances the accuracy of data collected.

Akorion is an agtech company that digitizes agricultural value chains to enable all commercial farmers and other agribusinesses to access high-quality production and marketing services through the flagship platform EzyAgric. EzyAgric is a web and mobile app that serves as a one-stop centre for all actors in the value chain to directly transact with each other. Using the community-based service provider, EzyAgric is a knowledge hub with effective last-mile service delivery and sufficient information flow-up to the smallholder farmer level.

BVL Technologies is a Uganda-based IT solutions service provider within the agri-business sector, focusing on software development and mobile service/payment solutions (apps). BVL specializes in crop traceability through data-collection/surveys at the farm level, digital mapping, financial-transaction tracking across the value chain, logistics tracking, online-/offline-mode data-collection, and reporting. In addition, its product and service offer includes the following: client support on programme design and mapping, digital platform design and development, product implementation and training, and ongoing digital platform management.

Challenge #3: Enabling access of farmers to agricultural extension workers, tools and equipment

Gudie Leisure Farm, through GudieTV, plans to digitize extension services, farmer inputs, catalogs and tools by creating videos that are demand driven to run at the village level. Alongside GudieTV, Gudie Leisure Farm prepares district agents with tools and equipment on demand and generates a directory of the pool of physical extension workers at the village level.

Akello Banker uses data and mobile technology to enable millions of low-income earners (like farmers and traders) to access critical and sometimes life-saving products, such as medical services, tractor hires, quality seed and even groceries, all on credit. Akello Banker offers a data-driven, mobile (USSD and SMS) and web app that enables farmers to order tractor hires, extension workers, and equipment and tools on credit, while enabling the service providers to manage, schedule and execute their work easily. Akello Banker offers easy access to life-saving products and services by leveraging technology and partnerships with local service providers to offer structured repayments compatible with user needs.

SPARK Agro-Initiatives increases access to basic agro-information by all farmers using an ICT mobile-based call centre. It will act as a channel for delivering information from the organizations to the farmers. The project will favour smallholder farmers since most of them own a mobile phone and can afford to make a call to inquire for information.

During the three-month acceleration programme, the 10 teams are undergoing mentoring sessions and conducting field emersions to better customize the solutions to the target users. Then, in April 2019, three start-ups will be chosen as the winners: one start-up per challenge. The winners will receive seed funding from UNCDF to complete the final phase of the project: a pilot of the solutions with the agricultural sector partners.

This project is part of the broader digital@UNCDF strategy, which aims to bring together the various elements and stakeholders necessary to develop and refine digital solutions that are geared towards supporting youth to innovate, developing scalable solutions in the sectors of finance, agriculture, education, health, energy and transportation, and increasing job creation. Learn more and check in on the progress and ultimate results of Innovate4Agriculture at https://cda.ug/i4a/ and the UNCDF-MM4P blog www.uncdf.org/mm4p/blog.