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Nigeria has a thriving digital agriculture Agtech ecosystem. Two Agtech innovators were featured in this webinar, Babban Gona and AFEX. They demonstrate the powerful proximity of working with farmers, ensuring their access to capital, and working closely with farmers to trade via a commodity platform.
- Babban Gona's unique technology platform enables their vision of creating millions of jobs for youth and making farming more profitable. The model also deals with the root causes of violence and a constructive route to strong economic growth, poverty alleviation, and reduced migration of the unemployed. Babban Gona is currently the largest maize-producing entity in West Africa. Over ten years, they have enabled smallholder members to increase their yields sustainably, attain net incomes of more than double the national average, and maintain repayment rates of over 99% on their loans. Babban Gona is currently growing very rapidly. In 2020, through leveraging our proprietary technology, they will present how they have doubled in size, serving roughly 40,000 smallholders to farm 80,000 acres. By 2021, they worked with 86,000 farmers cultivating 140,000 acres across Nigeria. The webinar will illustrate this critical work, proximal to both youth and farming, and feature the core of the business with climate-smart agriculture and climate change mitigation initiatives and building farmers' resilience to climate change-related shocks. Through their Women's Economic Development Initiative (WEDI), they support rural women to establish businesses and access education, training, financing, and inputs.
- AFEX harnesses Africa's commodities and talent to build shared wealth and prosperity. The AFEX infrastructure and platform investments work to unlock capital to power a trust-based economy in Africa's commodities markets. AFEX presented the development and deployment of a viable commodities exchange model for the West African market and illustrate their approach to impact one million producers, providing services in productivity and value capture and access to finance and markets. By deploying an efficient market system, AFEX expects to facilitate trade with Africa worth over USD500 million in the next five years. AFEX's vision is to be the reference point for commodities in Africa. To achieve this goal, AFEX looks to introduce products that de-risk the sector, drive financial inclusion for rural communities, develop technology for data collection and market access, and enable capital deployment.
- Chair: Parmesh Shah, Global Lead, Data-Driven Digital Agriculture, Agriculture and Food Global Practice, The World Bank
- Akinyinka Akintunde, COO, AFEX Nigeria
- Hemense Orkar, Vice President, Corporate Services and Partnerships, AFEX Nigeria
- Ubong Nyang, Head of Partneships, Babban Gona
- Benedict Agbo, Head Anchor Borrowers Program, Central Bank of Nigeria
- Dr. Kabir Yusuf, Senior Technical Adviser to the Minister of Agriculture (FMARD)
- Ms Aude Sauvaget – Senior Portfolio Officer – AgriFI at EDFI Management Company
Meeting number:2307 918 2107
Password: UNvCgpVu453
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