Digital innovation in agriculture, a sector that employs more than 70 percent of Uganda’s population, presents an opportunity for enhanced productivity, resilience- building, market access and financial inclusion of smallholders and agri-businesses.

However, most players in the sector still grapple with understanding how digital can help them address some of their most pertinent challenges, such as covering the cost for the development of digital solutions and mitigating the risks of working with digital innovators for the first time. Additionally, digital innovators do not fully comprehend the challenges players in the agriculture value chain may face and often lack the capacity to pilot and fine-tune their innovations to get market-ready products.

In order to bridge this gap, UNCDF, organised the Innovate4Agriculture challenge in partnership with the Innovation Village, Mukwano Industries, National Union of Coffee Agribusinesses and Farm Enterprises, and Welthungerhilfe. The Innovate4agriculture challenge, funded by Norad, connected start-ups with actors in the agriculture value chain to address constraints in agriculture using digital solutions. Three companies, Oriems Cloud, Hamwe East Africa and Spark Agro Initiatives were selected out of 50 start-up applications through a rigorous three phased process that comprised of a boot camp, an accelerator programme and a pilot of the winning solutions.

Today, smallholder farmers who supply seed oil to Mukwano Industries are able to better manage their operations and store their data securely while earning loyalty points using the Oriems Cloud platform. Through their M-farmer app, Hamwe East Africa has improved traceability in the coffee value chain. SPARK Agro-Initiatives has increased access to basic agro-information by all farmers using an ICT mobile-based call centre.

Learn more about the Innovate4Agriculture challenge in this video.