AgroCenta

AgroCenta (AgroCenta Technologies Inc.) is a Ghana-based agricultural technology company that operates an end-to-end digital platform for rural agricultural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its platform connects smallholder farmers across multiple agricultural value chains to a larger online market, allowing them to trade, arrange transportation, and receive real-time market information by SMS and voice services from basic phones, alongside access to financial services.

The company's Velociti platform issues a digital identity to smallholder farmers and other value chain actors, and uses big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence to build alternative data sets that allow these users to be assessed for financial products. Services offered through Velociti include micro-lending, mobile payments, insurance, savings and pensions. Velociti has a stated target of reaching more than 15 million smallholder farmers in Africa within five years.

AgroCenta frames its work around a farm-to-fork approach that engages stakeholders across the value chain to remove bottlenecks and improve transparency and efficiency, and reports its results against poverty, hunger, gender equality and decent work objectives, including efforts to increase women's participation in farming and land ownership in Ghana.

Founding story

Co-founders Michael Ocansey and Francis Obirikorang became familiar with bottlenecks in the Ghanaian agricultural supply chain while working at the digital agriculture company Esoko, including problems faced by Ghanaian smallholders.

Business model

AgroCenta operates a digital platform serving smallholder farmers and other agricultural value chain actors, combining market linkage and trading, transportation services, market information delivered via SMS and voice, and digital financial services. Financing is provided through participating financial institutions rather than solely by the company itself, with AgroCenta supplying the digital identity and alternative data layer that enables those institutions to lend.

Traction

The company reports distribution of over 70,000 metric tons of produce since 2018, more than 10,000 smallholder farmers accessing input financing loans from participating financial institutions since 2020 with an average loan size of about $200, an increase in farmers' daily spend to $2.5 per day against a $4.0 target for 2023, and a 50% increase in active participation of women in agriculture as primary producers.

Latest developments

AgroCenta has been running a project, "Scaling AgroCenta Platform and Adoption for Effective Market Linkages in Ghana," which aims to build a sustainable rural outreach and adoption model using farmers and extension agents to reach 20,000 cereal value chain users in Ghana and establish long-term market connections.