Platform for African – European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development

Thursday, February 10, 2022

Revolutionizing the Resilience of Smallholder Farmers through Digital Agripreneurs in Africa


10 February 2022. Revolutionizing the Resilience of Smallholder Farmers through Digital Agripreneurs in Africa by World Bank

KUZA’s OneNetwork is an ecosystem platform with a human user interface (youth Agripreneurs) offering high-quality bundled services to smallholder farmers to increase their productivity & income.

KUZA has taken a holistic, long-term systemic approach to identity and incubate rural youth through its Rural Entrepreneur Development Incubators (REDI) as Agri-entrepreneurs and become members of OneNetwork, KUZA’s digital marketplace. Agripreneurs provide personalized digital extension services to their farmers using specially designed portable digital kits, dramatically reducing the upskilling and networking costs, making them accessible even in the off-grid areas. Working alongside 4,000 youth Agripreneurs 600,000 smallholder farmers, KUZA’s OneNetwork is creating sustainable economic opportunities for all agriculture ecosystem actors. KUZA’s work has impacted over 6.0 million people and created 153,321 new jobs across Africa and Asia.

The solution
  • Web-based platforms such as Kuza One offer new opportunities for transforming smallholder farming. Through its REDI programme, Kuza One trains young people from rural communities to become agripreneurs.
  • Agripreneurs join the OneNetwork digital marketplace and connect with service providers to offer bundled services to smallholder farmers, such as access to high-quality input, crop advisory, credit, and market linkages. They each support 200 smallholder farmers to help them boost their productivity and incomes.
  • The extension services are provided for free and are sustained through transaction commissions.
Sriram Bharatam, Founder & Chief Mentor, KUZA One, talks about the challenges of smallholder farmers and how KUZA is leveraging the power of rural youth as the last-mile change agents providing trusted relationships between smallholders and service providers through a Public Philanthropy Private Platform (PPPP) model to transform the agri-food sector at scale.



Story:
HOW TO START AND MAKE AROUND SH40,000 A MONTH WITH RED EARTH WORMS BUSINESS IN KENYA

The demand for organic foods in Kenya is on the rise amid the increasing health-conscious consumers who are keen to know the origin of what they are buying to eat. This has caused a ripple effect in organic farming which is currently increasing very fast to meet the ever-growing organic markets in Kenya. Now, one of the approaches in organic farming is the application of biological methods to protect and provide the much-needed nutrients to plants. Some of these plant nutrients include vermicompost and vermiliquid which can only be found from red earthworms which ingest food scraps and other organic waste at a rapid pace. Rearing these worms can create a lucrative business for anyone keen to make cool cash from less capital investment as it is not costly to establish and it is, at the moment, not crowded.

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