Benefits of Agritech in Improving Profits for Farmers and Vendors

Agritech has proven to be an effective platform for improving and generating profits for Kenyan farmers and vendors.

Kenyan farmers need to be provided with more technological platforms that can help them reap more from agriculture.

These platforms are capable of leading to higher yields, and higher profits for the farmers who solely depend on middlemen to have access to markets for their produce.

60 percent of the population in Kiambu County relies on farming for a living.

Despite this, middlemen benefit more from the yields more than the real farmers who put all their efforts to see they reap big.

Eleni Giokos, of ‘CNN Marketplace Africa’, visited the county where he met Joseph Kiarie Ng’ang’a, a farmer in Kiambu who explains the biggest challenge that he faces.

“The middleman is making the most money from our hard work. We are small-scale farmers and those who require our produce might bill us large quantities,” disclosed Mr. Ng’ang’a.

Such farmers depending on middlemen to be able to sell produce need to be enlightened on the financial benefits of embracing agritech.

Agritech is helping to bring order to the market and Twiga Foods is one company helping farmers and vendors to improve profits.

Vendors order stock from Twiga’s online platform and the company delivers products from small-holding farmers to shops the next day.

According to Twiga Foods, they serve about 3,000 farmers a month and 6,000 clients a week.

Grant Brooke, CEO, Twiga Foods explains the benefits of this technology: “If you can aggregate the purchasing power of Africa’s markets, farmers will organize themselves around that purchasing power. They’ll make investments on the backend knowing they have insured market and their production numbers will go up.”

Agritech like Twiga has also helped to enhance the ease, communication, and safety for the delivery of products which, in part, is helped by the mobile money service M-Pesa which is well-used in Kenya.

Data and analytics are being used by i-Procure to help farmers get products faster and at a better price. i-Procure say that they’ve supplied about 22,000 farmers with produce at a rate 15 to 20 percent cheaper than the market price.

Stefano Carcoforo, CEO, i-Procure discloses how their service is beneficial especially for those in more isolated areas: “Most farming communities in Kenya live in quite remote locations. And so access to certain agricultural inputs…in most places, they’re not readily available. The other issue is the price point. The cost of the product is significantly higher than what it would be in an urban area. So really, the name of the game is getting the raw materials they need to them in the quantities they need when they need them.”

With agritech proving to be successful, the government needs to work more closely with companies like i-Procure so they can scale even faster.