Denis Opudo
Kitovu is a startup which is based in Nigeria and helps farmers in improving their yields and help farmers to get ready market for their products. The platform ensures that the farmers don’t fail to get market for their produce hence assuring farmers that at after harvesting their produce they will have a ready market to sell them.
Most of the small-scale farmers in Nigeria just use survival tactics to get whatever they require meaning they are not always sure of getting the best yield or market after harvesting. The high cost of farming in Nigeria like the cost of soil tests cannot be afforded by many farmers. The government is not putting much on the agricultural sector in that the farmers are not able to get the right advice and extension services this is according to the chief executive officer (CEO) Nwachinemere Emeka while addressing Disrupt Africa.
It passes through long supply chains before the farmer gets the farm inputs, making the middlemen to take advantage of the situation by hoarding and increasing the prices of the inputs making it time-consuming and at the same time expensive to farmers. The same middlemen increase the prices of the produce forcing some processors to prefer importation rather than local purchase. The startup is looking forward to settling all those messes by giving the farmer the priority.
Kitovu has managed to carry out three types of research in Oyo State, Bauchi, and Niger collaborating with the International Fertiliser Development Centre to construct demonstration farms. The researches have helped the Kitovu farmers to get an increase of more than 200% in crop yields, and have been able to reach out to more than 3, 000 small-scale farmers. The startup is looking forward to having a significant expansion.
In 2018 Kitovu is looking forward to expanding in six other states of Nigeria, reach more than 200, 000 farmers and train around 2, 000 small-scale entrepreneurs. The main objective is to get bigger in Nigeria then move to other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The startup gets its funding from selling or giving farmers inputs on credit and through producing aggregation for processors and export offtakers though it has a number of challenges.
