There’s a new breed of young African women agri-tech entrepreneurs sweeping through the continent, with a mission to transform agriculture into a powerhouse that not only feeds Africa’s growing population but also employ its young people.
Agriculture contributes about 30 per cent to the continent’s GDP but the sector remains hampered by an ageing generation of farmers with an average age of 60, poor productivity and low investment, posing a significant threat to Africa’s future food security.
From Rwanda’s Claudette Akinpaye, Nigeria’s Divine-Love Akam , to Uganda’s Zilla Mary Arach, these young entrepreneurs are looking to address some of these challenges through innovative ways and proving agriculture is the new cool!
Merging her passion for agriculture and Technology, Zilla Mary, together with her co-founders Esther Karwera, William Luyinda and Jacob Katana, founded EzyAgric, an agri-tech company digitising the agricultural value chain to provide better production and marketing services to farmers and other agribusinesses in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The tech geek who moonlights as the company’s Chief Product Officer, talked to GLIM about her entrepreneurial journey.
It all started as a game of ‘develop, win and get cash’ back at university as the group of 3rd-year Computer Engineering students invented apps with the sole purpose of getting into competitions and winning money.
Besides their love for this game, something else united them; their passion for agriculture, so it was a no brainer that they often found themselves creating apps solving issues in the sector.
“At campus, my final year project was still in agriculture. I was developing a model to be able to easily detect diseases in animals.”
The group got to work, developing their first app ‘Lunda Lite’, a poultry app that helped farmers with information tracking. Using this app, they were able to participate in the Orange Community Awards as well as the NTV Idea Lands. Much as they didn’t come first, they emerged second runner ups, walking away with mentorship opportunities and their much-needed cash prize.
However, to access the money from Orange, they had a requirement to fulfil; have a registered company. This forced Zilla and her friends to register one with the sole purpose of receiving the money. They got the money, the game proved lucrative and fun. So it continued. However, it was not long before they came to a new realisation.
“We saved the money from the two competitions then realised that we could get serious with the company. Shortly before our graduation, we went and rented an office and started developing products we put on Play Store for people to download and use for free.”
At this point Zilla says, they had no clear business model, but this would change in 2015 after they landed their first donor USAID and were matched with a mentor.
“They tried to mold us to realize that we didn’t have to just develop apps, we needed to talk to the users. So we went to Manafwa, Mbale, Kitgum, Gulu, and interacted with farmers.”
During this interaction, they were able to identify four key issues affecting the farmers, poor financial accessibility, saturation of fake inputs in the market, knowledge gap on the planting and harvesting period, as well as market access.
“So we realized that we needed to come up with an end to end solution and it’s the vision of the company, ‘To become the go-to one-stop centre for all the products, marketing and financial services for all farmers’. That’s the vision, that’s where we are going, everything we are doing, we are trying to digitalize that process.”
Launched in 2015, EzyAgric helps farmers access financial services, genuine agricultural inputs, garden mapping, market their produce, view daily weather conditions, among others.
Due to Uganda’s notoriously low-tech adoption rate coupled with low Internet coverage, the app was not an instant success on the market. “When you talked to the people about tech, their thought was, ‘what is this thing that is going to help us farm?’ The understanding was not yet very clear, even outside the agribusiness community, they didn’t understand what tech was.”
However, Zilla says, they were patient, but to survive, they turned to search and apply for grants. They got grants from organizations like World Food Programme, USAID, TecnoServe, among others which they used to grow the company, put up proper structures, including hiring a team.
“Initially we were looking for passion and agility. Mastery was not so much because the people we were bringing were straight out of campus. They were interns- so there was a lot of learning and mentorship that was availed to them.”
Then came pitching to investors; “We talked to different investors, pitched our ideas, attended conferences, interacted, networked, got referrals, we exploited every possible opportunity. It’s not like a one-off. Getting investors is a process”.
A process that is surely not for the fainthearted as Zilla intimates they had many rejection letters. Nonetheless, 3 years later, they would close their first investor.
In 2019, Germany company- K+S and Pan-African fintech company MFS Africa- announced their partnership with Akorion that would see the EzyAgric app expand to India. Zilla says, this greatly boosted the growth of the company.
Also, the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic was a blessing in disguise for the company as people found an appreciation for their products and services.
“We saw a surge last year when people were in-house and not moving, that’s when people started looking for the closest alternative. People started using the app, we saw so many downloads. Before that, we weren’t getting any orders through the app, they were just calling directly.”
The app has since accumulated over 5,000 downloads, supporting over 200,000 farmers in 6 countries with plans to expand to Kenya, Ghana, Cote d’ivoire, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi and Nigeria, next year.
In 2020, EzyAgric emerged 2nd global winner for USAID’s ‘Fall Armyworm Tech Prize’ while Zilla has been previously awarded ‘Overall Young Achiever of the Year’ and ‘Young Achievers Award’ for her contributions to the agricultural space.
From recruitment challenges, high costs of training farmers on how to use the app, to generally changing negative mindsets surrounding agri-tech, surely this has been far from a smooth sail.
“It has not been a smooth ride like you wake up, you work on things- and get money, no-no. There was a time that we the founders had pending arrears but now we can afford health insurance for our employees and other benefits.”
Zilla’s journey is a true testament that innovation, grit, tenacity, passion and commitment are what African youth entrepreneurs need to transform the continent’s agricultural sector, with a bright future looming on the horizon.
“My dream as a person is to see every farmer and kid born in the farming community to have hope that they will be educated, have jobs, and opportunities that a parent in another job is having, that means through farming the smart way.”
Am very proud of Zilla, she is one of the strong women I lookup to since Stem girls camp 2016. Go girl