Smallholder Farmers
The Haller Foundation and Mara Phones Boost Accessibility to Mobile Technology Across Rural Africa
Digital transformation has been actively and earnestly accelerated across Africa, with more companies and organisations than ever investing time, money and skills towards the goal. This has been pushed even further by the effects of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. According to the World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa has been hit the hardest by the economic impact of COVID-19, with an estimated 23 million people in the region projected to be pushed into poverty by the pandemic. However, there are regions in Africa that this transformation has struggled to reach due to long histories of extensive digital exclusion from even before the pandemic. In these rural areas, the adoption of digital technologies and devices can make a tangible difference to the communities that inhabit them, especially th...
Agritech SupPlant Raises $10-Million to Accelerate South African Agriculture Growth
Sourced from Getty Images. /* custom css */ .tdi_4_476.td-a-rec-img{ text-align: left; }.tdi_4_476.td-a-rec-img img{ margin: 0 auto 0 0; } Today SupPlant, a leading precision agriculture hardware-software solution, has announced its recent funding round, raising $10-million partially dedicated to accelerating its penetration into the South African Market. The round is co-led by Boresight Capital, Menomadin Foundation, Smart-Agro Fund and Mivtah Shamir. The raise brings SupPlants’s total funding to more than $19-million. New Challenges Faced by Farmers The round comes amidst global warming impacting South African farmers who are dealing daily with the unpredicted climate that is changing rapidly causing tropical storms, cold spells, heat waves and constant lack of irrigation water. /* custo...
The Haller Foundation Partners with Deciwatt to Improve Accessibility for Safe Sources of Light and Electricity in Kenya
Deciwatt’s NowLights supply renewable, sustainable energy. The Haller Foundation, a grassroots NGO registered in the UK and based in Kenya, is continuing its efforts to support smallholder farmers in the country through its Partnership with Deciwatt – an organisation and charity that provides sustainable, low-cost, low-energy lighting and electricity to rural communities across the globe. To aid the Haller Foundation’s efforts in supporting and enriching the lives of smallholder farmers in rural areas in Kenya, Deciwatt supplied 12 sustainable NowLights to the Foundation in support of the re-launching of the Haller Foundation’s award-winning Haller Farmers App. “We’re really excited to be building on our existing relationship with The Haller Foundation, where we supplied Gravity Ligh...
NIRSAL partners NASENI to create 110,000 jobs in agric sector
The Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL Plc) has entered into partnership with the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) with a view to creating over 110,000 jobs in the nation’s agricultural value chain. NIRSAL said in a statement in Abuja Friday that the move is in “continuation of its mandate of providing end-to-end solutions aimed at fixing breakages along the Agricultural Value Chains (AVC) in Nigeria”. According to the statement, NIRSAL has engaged NASENI as its technical collaborative partner for the conceptualization, design, development, deployment, implementation and execution of various schemes/projects under the NIRSAL-NASENI Comprehensive Tractor Recovery Scheme, the NIRSAL Climate-Smart Modular Geo-Coopera...
Okomu Oil Palm wants central bank to review anchor borrowers programme
Okomu Oil Palm Company Plc. wants a review of CBN’s Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP) to accommodate more farmers and to shore up the nation’s foreign earnings from agriculture. The ABP is targeted at smallholder farmers engaged in the production of rice, maize, wheat and cash crops like oil palm, cocoa and rubber, among others. Speaking with newsmen on Monday in Benin, Okomu Oil’s Managing Director, Dr Graham Hefer, noted that cash crop farmers were yet to fully benefit from the programme. He said food crop farmers had an edge because they could cultivate, harvest, sell and repay their loans within the specified one year period. “It is easy for farmers engaged in annual crops to meet their targets. “This doesn’t happen with cash crops because in the first three years of oil palm production...
