My grandmother was a smallholder farmer and I always wondered why despite her hard work, she never really had a lot to show for it. It was to take several years for me to find out. When I got admission to University of Nigeria Nsukka to study Mechanical Engineering, she teased me, saying I was running away from the farm. I promised her that whatever I learn, I would apply that to build solutions that help her and people like her. Unfortunately, she passed away before I had the chance to keep my promise.
And something I shouldn’t have forgotten, I forgot. Well until I was posted to Oyo State for mandatory National Youth Service. There, I joined the Agro-Allied Scheme and started my first farm and for the first time truly lived in the shoes of farmers. Not only did I achieve sub-optimal yields, market access was also in-existent. I felt there had to be a way to use emerging technology to solve these problems. That was how Kitovu Technology was born. My team comprises of very young and talented sector diverse skilled graduates with a passion to transform Africa into the hub that feeds the world by leveraging technology.
Link to online video
Your products and services
Our core products are FarmPack, FarmSwap, and eProcure. FarmPack is a bundled product offering consisting of soil and crop-specific fertilizers, improved seedlings, agro-chemicals, extension, advisory and disease early warning, while FarmSwap is our flagship microcredit product that allows farmers to take FarmPack and pay us with produce at harvest. eProcure is our produce aggregation service for processors and exporters.
Your success factors
In-depth experience and understanding of the Nigerian agricultural space, very innovative product offerings, a huge market, and team of very passionate young people constitute our biggest rights to succeed.
Your factors differentiating and disruptive compared to the existing
Unlike our competition who are not able to provide the disruptive services we provide; from soil and crop-specific fertilizers to precise delivery of products enabled by our produce rank algorithm, we provide farmers with microcredit for inputs, a huge value-added service to them alongside the free extension, advisory and disease early warning we provide them.
Your business model
We leverage our micro-entrepreneur network to sell our core products; FarmPack, FarmSwap, and eProcure, which is how we make money.
A few words about your competitors
At the moment, we do not have a single business organization that does what we do. But we have different organizations that provide some of the services that we provide.
They include:
Soil Testing-Zeetech, SGS, IITA
Traditional Inputs Marketing-Cybernetics, Maina Seeds
Produce Aggregation-Ojaoko, Ngex.com
Your website
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