Achieving a milestone is something worthy of applause, especially when negotiating a period where sourcing for investment funds is no longer deemed a stroll-in-the-park.
For Kenyan agri-tech startup, Farmers Pride, who just secured a $220,000 fund from US-based impact investor Gray Matter Capital, their achievement can be seen worthy of a compliment, and also a move in the correct direction for the brand and the sector.
Farmers Pride specializes in e-commerce, beaming its focus primarily on connecting smallholder village level farmers with solutions ranging from information, quality inputs, and services.
Since its inception, it has availed itself both online and offline and making strides to ensure a smooth flow and steady increase in farm production and productivity.
Farmers Pride’s website has shown the brand’s commitment towards, their primary target who are summed up of village farmers and agro-dealers facing challenges ranging from acquiring counterfeit products to record-keeping, inadequate capital options, and having adequate management expertise.
Farmers end up buying poor quality goods at rip-off prices due to limited or 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.
The support afforded Farmer’s Pride from Gray Matter Capital will go a long way in further proffering solutions towards supplementing the efforts of women agro-dealers through structured education programs and training.
It will control the number of funds channeled into developing agro-dealers, youth-owned Digishops, and the launch of 50 high-tech villages.
Another primary essence of this funding is that it will go a long way in structuring and upgrading DigiShop technology and its support services herein even down to last-mile SMS and voice-powered delivery of farmer education and inputs.
Speaking on their achievement, Farmer’s Pride Founder, Samuel Munguti said:
“Farmers Pride’s competitive advantage and uniqueness lies in adopting an agro-dealer franchising concept, and integrating it 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.”
On his part, the Pipeline Development Lead at Gray Matters Capital stated:
“Farmers Pride transforms the women-owned informal stores into micro-franchisees that can build traceability of the inputs and thus, guarantee the quality.”
The vigorous education program is aiming at an extra 30,000 farmers by 2022. Before this, Farmer’s Pride received $335,000 from a couple of initiatives such as the D-prize Global Distribution Challenge award, Kenya Markets Trust, Climate Information, and the World Bank group.
Featured Image: farmerspride
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