Business models and key success drivers of Agtech startups

Interested in agech in West Africa? Discover details about business and policy issues young digital agriculture start-ups are facing, their key success drivers and how they are trying to achieve success in this new CTA publication.

The publication is an abridged version of a report that I co-authored with a colleague that CTA published.

It is an interpretative phenomenological research that focuses on youth-led companies offering digital services to the agro-food sector in West Africa. Youth is considered as

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‘Uber-ising’ access to tractors for improved productivity in Nigeria and Kenya

CTA and Hello Tractor project's booking Agent. Credit photo: Hello Tractor

As the world’s population continues to increase, it is projected that crop yields will need to double to achieve food security. Sub-Saharan Africa alone holds 60% of the global inventory of uncultivated farmland; yet average crop yields continue to fall well below global averages. In addition to food security, increased agricultural productivity remains critical to alleviating entrenched poverty and improving livelihoods for the millions of farmers that survive on less than US$2/day.

Tractor owners lack the data, knowledge and experience

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Caribbean farmers could be going digital

Sugar cane - Credit photo: iStock/yupiyan /

NB: Article that I published in Scitech Europa

Guest writer, Ken Lohento, is the Senior ICT for Agriculture Programme Coordinator at the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA). The CTA was established under the Lomé Convention between the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States and EU member states. Lohento, explains how blockchain could unlock new markets for Caribbean farmers.

Blockchain might be best-known for disrupting the financial sector, thanks to Bitcoin and more recently, Facebook’s Libra.

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When young Africans hack the farming sector

Finalists of Pitch AgriHack 2018 organised by CTA - Credit photo: CTA

The article below, published by the organisation CTA in 2019, was not written by me, but present results of some activities I led at CTA.

The AgriHack Talent initiative is one of the CTA’s best-known projects, particularly through its AgriHack Pitch start-up support programme. We take a look back on this initiative, which, over the course of just a few years, has succeeded in bringing together agriculture, entrepreneurship and new technologies.

Kigali, Rwanda, November 2013. On

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