One of Farmcrowdy’s outgrowers is Patience Arthur-Akpan. Farmcrowdy addresses farmers’ access to finance through an innovative agricultural platform that partners farmers with sponsors to mutual benefit, providing an alternate source of finance to improve their farms. Even farmers who can access credit are limited by problems of timely loan disbursement and very high interest rates. Only 2.5% of Nigeria’s smallholder farmers have access to financing or credit, limiting their ability to expand or improve their farms. Nigeria’s agricultural sector suffers extremely low productivity, due to reliance upon age-old farming techniques and farmers’ limited access to financing. Despite the high output, Nigeria struggles to meet its own subsistence needs and relies upon imports to satisfy demand. Approximately one third of Nigeria’s workforce is employed in the agricultural sector and close to 87% of its population engage in agriculture as an economic activity. Nigeria has the highest farm output in Africa and is among the world’s top-ten highest producing agricultural economies. Women outgrowers using Farmcrowdy’s platform. Now people come to Wasini for clean water. The accompanying image shows a young man unloading a 20L bottle of Boreal Light’s Water on the shore at Shimoni village on the Kenyan mainland. People have been coming from the Kenyan mainland to purchase water from the kiosks on the island. And not just the islanders are benefiting. Now the situation has changed: recently, with two kiosks installed on Wasini Island, the islander no longer need to rely upon rainwater or expensive water imported from Mombasa. Since the kiosk’s introduction it has provided 3 permanent jobs and 2 part-time jobs, in addition to 5,000 liters of desalinated water daily for the island’s residents. Prior to Boreal Light commencing operations on the island, locals were forced to import water at high cost by boat from Mombasa, or to rely on intermittently available rainwater collection. Boreal Light’s Water Kiosks can produce clean and hygienic water from brackish or sea-water sources, solving these problems of water access and scarcity.īoreal Light’s first Water Kiosk was installed on Wasini Island, which lies near the Tanzanian border. Across Sub-Saharan Africa millions of people are forced to collect water from easily contaminable surface or rain water sources or to travel long distances to purchase water of equally questionable quality. This water scarcity exists, not from a physical lack of water, but rather that the investments in water resources and relevant human capacity are not substantial enough to meet the existing demand for clean water for drinking and agricultural purposes. Two-thirds of Sub-Saharan Africa’s land mass is arid or semiarid and more than 300 million of the 800 million people living there suffer from severe water shortages with less than 1000m3 of water per year per person. Companies that insist on the same processes they have implemented in Europe, will not succeed in developing countries.Ī resident from Shimoni, on the Kenyan mailand, unloads a 20L water jug to purchased from one of Boreal Light’s Water Kiosk on Wasini Island. have a solution that works especially well in the African environment or provides a cheaper solution than existing ones with appropriate quality) and they have to be open minded with regards to knowledge transfer and working with other cultures. This way we avoid potential efficiency losses.Įuropean companies that want to access African markets need to show a strong technological advantage (e.g. from GreenTec Capital) in order to enable us to work jointly and improve business models. It is important that these individuals have on the one hand a good network and understanding of the local African market and the problem they want to solve, but on the other hand are open to knowledge transfer and advice from developed countries (i.e. a degree in Europe or the US) and who understand both cultural contexts well. We are looking for African entrepreneurs, who have experience in foreign countries (e.g.
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