Cohort 2022
Make African farmers bankable
Introduction
Jan Willem van Casteren from eProd Solutions, joined our program in 2022 with a promising idea to improve the connection between farmers and financial institutions in Africa. eProd is a company based in Kenya that offers supply chain management software for agribusinesses. Founded in 2004, it provides an affordable, flexible and automated way of controlling agribusinesses, through easy collection of reliable farmer data.
Vision
Offer-cost effective, credible and verifiable data to make farmers bankable for traditional financial institutions
Problem statement
In Africa, a significant infrastructure gap exists between financial institutions and smallholder farmers, posing a considerable challenge to fostering profitable connections and ensuring food security in the region.
Ambition
Our ambition is to leverage eProd’s platform to transform the lives of at least 2 million smallholder farmers in the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region. With approximately 33 million smallholder farms in Africa contributing up to 70 per cent of the food supply, empowering these farmers through enhanced access to financial instruments will lead to significant positive outcomes.
Idea
Create a first mile supply chain management system as an add-on to their current farm management system. Offering cost-effective, credible and verifiable data to make farmers bankable for traditional financial institutions.
Validated idea
Introducing eProd Cash – a scalable and interoperable system add-on.
After validating their idea through the program, eProd will create the add-on: eProd Cash. Now it’s known what data is required to make farmers bankable. eProd will become the trusted middleman between a financial institution and a smallholder farmer, starting in Kenya. A system will be created that ensures cost-effective credible and verifiable data that can easily and at scale be exchanged with financial institutions, through data standardization and interoperability.
The functionality add-on to the eProd solution includes three elements:
- Standardization and interoperability
- Data privacy management (USSD)
- APIs to financial institutions
Want to learn more?
Check out the full implementation roadmap for this validated idea to get inspired.