Tech in Africa
Kenya startup Farmers Pride has secured $220,000 from Gray Matters Capital, a US-based impact investor.
Farmers Pride is an e-commerce platform connecting smallholder village level farmers with solutions ranging from quality inputs, services, and information. Digishop marketplace operates both online and offline ensuring a steady increase in farm production and productivity.
According to their website, their main target market is village farmers and agro-dealers who face challenges from record-keeping, counterfeit products, inadequate capital options, and management expertise. Farmers end up buying poor quality goods at highly exploitative prices where there is limited to no education or extension support.
The funding secured will help Farmer’s Pride expand their reach to half a million rural female farmers, in an effort to boost their income and productivity through increased access to insurance services, quality farm inputs and services, market linkages, financial services, farming mechanization, and insurance services.
Farmer’s Pride will offer its support to women agro-dealers via structured training and education programs. This will dictate the amount of funding going to the development of agro-dealers, the launch of 50 high-tech villages, and youth-owned Digishops.
The funding will help DigiShop technology upgrade its support services to last-mile SMS and voice-powered delivery of farmer education and inputs. The robust education program is targeting an additional 30,000 farmers by the year 2022.
Earlier on, Farmer’s Pride received US$335,000 from initiatives such as the D-prize Global Distribution Challenge award, Kenya Markets Trust, Climate Information, and the World Bank group.
“Farmers Pride’s competitive advantage and uniqueness lies in adopting an agro-dealer franchising concept and integrating that with the DigiShop technology to transform rural women-owned agro-dealer shops, support women farmers to increase their income and improve last-mile delivery of agricultural solutions,” said Samuel Munguti (Founder) in a statement.
“ Farmers Pride transforms the women-owned informal stores into micro-franchisees that can build traceability of the inputs and thus, guarantee quality,” said Sharda Vishwanathan, the Pipeline Development Lead at Gray Matters Capital.
