Cellulant’s Agrikore platform – an online marketplace for smallholder farmers, agricultural input and produce traders is tapping into Africa’s emerging Agritech market valued at €5.3 billion (US$5.9 billion) according to a new report by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and Dalberg Advisors.
This comes as 94 per cent of the continent’s emerging Agritech market remains untapped, according to the survey.
The State of Digitalisation of Agriculture in Africa 2019 report identifies online marketplace solutions such as Agrikore as significant use cases of how digital tools are being built to tackle major challenges of attracting and retaining a significant number of buyers and sellers, and in thus doing, help to solve the problem of inefficient and fragmented agricultural markets.
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The Agriculture market in Africa is projected to grow to US$1trillion by 2030. It continues to be a catalyst of sustainable development primarily for enhanced food security, secondary, in the reduction of poverty and the overall growth of the continent’s economy.
“Technologies such as mobile telephony or blockchain have become enablers that can be used to solve some of the challenges plaguing the sector,” the report states.
The report also identified Cellulant as being among only 390 active Digitalisation for Agriculture (D4Ag) solution providers that are working across the continent and have the potential to not only support agricultural transformation but also the ability to do so sustainably and inclusively.
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The survey presents evidence on how these enterprises have proven that digital tools can improve market efficiency, transparency, aggregation and integration.
“Technology is at the heart of transformation in Africa. We believe by innovating around how supply and demand are organised, we can solve Africa’s food crisis. We are scaling up our existing payments products in the agriculture sector, this will allow us to increase access to payments for the millions of farmers who are still unbanked, despite the financial inclusion revolution,” said Bolaji Akinboro,Cellulant co-CEO
Unlike many of the D4Ag solution providers studied in the report, Cellulant’s Agrikore solution was noted to be one of the few marketplace players that are focusing on digitizing at both the input and produce stages by linking all the players in agriculture at the input level (farmers, agro-dealers, financial institutions, governments, development partners ) and at produce level(FMCG, produce aggregators).
The report noted that the bundling of digitally enabled Agritech solutions was gaining popularity with some enterprises incorporating either third party or proprietary payment solutions.
The report cites the use of Cellulant’s Tingg payments platform which powers Agrikore, as an example.
Africa’s Agritech market netted an estimated US$143 million — out of a total addressable market of US$2.6 billion in 2018 according to the report.
Digitalisation for Agriculture (D4Ag) is an emerging sector with an estimated total addressable market revenue of between €2.3 billion (mid-range estimate but with potential to go as high as €5.3 billion in 2019) and growing at 44 per cent per annum.
Cellulant is a leading Pan-African financial technology company that organizes Africa’s marketplaces by connecting buyers, sellers and other critical stakeholders with an underlying payments solution that enables them to make and receive payments.
It provides a single digital payments platform that runs an ecosystem of consumers, retailers, merchants, banks, mobile network operators, governments and international development partners.
Today, Cellulant’s payments platform hosts 120 of the largest banks in Africa, 40 mobile money operators, 600 local and international merchants; and is connected to 220M consumers across 34 countries.
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