AgroDomain Platform: The New Catalyst for Digital Transformation of the Agriculture Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa

AgroDomain platform is pushing the boundaries of market access and financial inclusion across Sub-Saharan Africa, creating agribusiness opportunities and stimulating cross border trades. The platform is typically thought of as the African amalgam of Amazon, Ebay, Ali Express & Uber focused primarily on the agricultural sector.

Given its extensive components and value chain processes addressed, AgroDomain’s transformative potential for the agricultural sector is enormous. The platform caters for agribusinesses both big and small, agricultural Cooperatives as well as smallholder farmers. The digital platform links the smallest of agricultural businesses, Agric Cooperatives and smallholder farmers to an expansive and ever-growing market of buyers, often bypassing middlemen and resulting in better prices for goods sold.

The extensive and diverse value chain processes addressed by the AgroDomain Platform makes it a truly super-marketplace and a one-stop shop for everything agriculture in the continent. The platform boasts of the most comprehensive array of solution components that stands it out.  Some of these components include:

Agro Marketplace:

The Agro Marketplace is a self-service agro-allied trading platform that drives agricultural transactions by providing market linkages between and amongst various value chain actors and enables the buying and selling of a wide range of agro-allied product categories. It empowers platform members with the tools to list Firm or Negotiable Offers/Bids, carry out negotiation via a counter-bidding process, make and receive payments via an Agro Purse, arrange for logistics and confirm delivery, provides linkage between farmers and commodity aggregators/processors and accommodates direct transactions between farmers and off-takers across the agricultural ecosystem.

The solution also provides participants with the tools for better insights and planning and to make direct orders from farmers without the intervention of middlemen, thereby smoothening the procurement process.  The Agro Marketplace is designed to host vast and extensive agro-allied product types across diverse agro-allied industries. 

Agro WebStores:

The Agro WebStores is envisioned to enable agribusinesses, farmers, cooperatives, agro insurance service providers and all value chain players create their customizable WebStore within their own niche and personalized commercial space on AgroDomain Platform.  The WebStore empowers owners with the tools to showcase their Agro brands across multiple African Countries and exclusively offer their products in local currencies across multiple Sub-Saharan African markets. Each Agro WebStore is designed to function as a sub-domain and accessible anytime anywhere using such store’s dedicated and unique address.

The Agro WebStores component is conceived to help African Agro Allied SMEs, MSMEs and Cooperatives as well as Smallholder farmers succeed, and to make it easy for them to conduct hyper-local transactions   anywhere within the sub-continent. It is also enables traditional offline brick and mortar agro-allied companies have online presence for their products and services as well as sell such agro-products across sub-Sahara Africa. The Agro WebStore is an international and yet hyper-local platform that takes away the challenges of lack of infrastructure and technical expertise which had customarily inhibited the ability of Agro-Allied local companies to venture into broader continental markets. It supports agro value chain players to enhance their brands, customers and store on every channel (website, email, social and mobile) at a continental level.

Agro Insure:

Agro Insure is a multi- faceted and robust solution comprising of the Agro Insurance Hub and the Agro Insurance Marketplace components designed to help farm owners and agribusinesses mitigate operational risks while protecting their farm projects and agribusinesses investments. It is focused on helping farmers, cooperatives and SMEs & MSMEs and other agri-businesses create and protect their wealth by leveraging technology to access insurance services at affordable and convenient cost/premium.

The Agro Insure automates the end-to-end processes for Agricultural and related insurance coverage. It covers the enlisting of insurance products by insurance services providers on the marketplace, the management of proposals and request for quotes, payments of premiums as well as insurance policies origination and management. The system also automates insurance claims and payment management. The Agro Insure is tightly integrated with the Agro Marketplace, Agro Funder and Agro Purse thereby ensuring total transparency in risk management for marketplace transactions, agro project funding as well as payment security.

The platform offers farmers and agribusiness operators’ choice and convenience as they can compare various insurance products on offer on the platform and have options to request for quotes from multiple insurance companies based on preferences. All related transactions from request for quotes to claims payment are conducted on the platform.

Agro Funder:

This is an innovative & impact driven crowdfunding framework for the agricultural sector designed to engender financial inclusion and to empower farmers, Cooperatives, SMEs, MSMEs and other agribusinesses with access to affordable funding to increase food production. It Connects SMEs, MSMEs, farm groups and agribusinesses that have  viable  and fundable farm project propositions to prospective investors through a pitching, enlisting and funding mechanism, thereby bridging the demand & supply gap in agro-financing in sub-Sahara Africa. Agro Funder enables farm groups and agribusinesses to pitch and enlist their agricultural/farm project propositions to prospective and discerning agro-sector investors, in order to obtain the necessary funding required for such projects. Each pitch farm project is evaluated carefully and thoroughly using predefined metrics and if adjudged viable, enlisted on the platform for purposes of sponsorship and funding by interested investors.

The Agro Funder is tightly integrated with the Agro Insure solution, ensuring that all approved and listed farm project funding pitches on the platform are covered with a 100% insurance coverage provided by one of our participating insurance service providers, in order to mitigate any risk while protecting the investors. It is also integrated with the Agro Marketplace, enabling project owner to enter into forward contracts with product Off-takers with aim of using said contracts as proof of existing buyers of the Farm products for which funding is sort.


Agro Mech:

Agro Mech is our solution for scaling mechanization in small holder and cluster farming systems. Agro Mech is designed to address several of the major constraints to farm mechanization uptake across Sub-Saharan Africa. It is envisioned to help the Smallholder farmers, farm groups and agribusinesses  address the problem ofhigh capital costs of acquisition as well as alleviating the lack of affordable financing for agricultural mechanization across sub-continent. It is also aimed at alleviating the challenges of supply-demand matching in fragmented value chains with poor information access, the scarcity and near absence of distribution infrastructure as well as issues of equipment quality assurance and ongoing maintenance in remote rural areas amongst others.

The solution provides service consumers with more choices and options and links smallholders to farm machinery or farm mechanization services thereby engendering affordability and availability. It equally empowers machinery manufacturers, dealers and sellers with more streamlined access to better sales channels and sales leads. Parties are provided the options to Sell, Buy, Lease or Hire on mutually agreed and negotiated terms.

Agro Coop:

The Agro Coop is designed to support various tiers of agro-cooperatives and farmers’ groups in enlisting new membership as well as organizing and managing such members. It provides the capabilities for cooperatives to aggregate product demands or supplies at different levels for eventual fulfilment in a most cost efficient and transparent manner. It also enables the consolidation/ integration of production and marketing entities in agriculture to achieve economies of scale and stronger presence in markets.  

Agro Coop facilitates farm data collections, maintenance of central registry, improved training, support for business planning, market analysis as well as the monitoring of geo-referenced service delivery. It enhances access to suitable financial services to farm groups and there members as a way to increase agricultural productivity and income.

Agro Net

This is a Peer to Peer Farmers Digital Advisory and Information Service that offers both on demand and periodically distributed (push) information and guidance to farmers, cooperatives and agribusinesses with the objective of helping them adopt better practices – ranging from the types of inputs they should consider to agronomic techniques, post-harvest handling/processing and marketing advice as well as overall farm business management tips.

The solution endorses e-agriculture in action and provides a solid framework for big data and analytics in agriculture. It features a participatory process for content production (i.e., topic selection and content adaptation informed by members’ feedback). Contents include photos, locally generated digital videos, questions and answers as well as informative articles around specific topics.

Agro Purse

The Agro Purse which consist of the integrated e-Wallet and payment components is a complete payment and settlement platform that allows AgroDomain registered members to make and receive payments for all their platform related transactions. User registration and KYC processes are required to activate the wallet on the platform.  Once registered and KYC verified, users can easily fund, send and receive money from their e-Wallet  through multiple channels such as Direct Bank Debit/Transfer, USSD, Credit/Debit Card Payments, Barter, Mvisa-QR etc. The Agro Purse is designed with high security features and integrates with a network of payment platforms. With the e-Wallet-based Agro Purse system, payments and settlements for transactions are transparent and seamless. Customers can also transfer funds from their Agro Purse e-Wallet to any bank account of their choice at any-time.

The Agro Purse is tightly integrated with the contracting functionality which automates the creation and management of transactional contracts for every transaction between Counter-parties on the AgroDomain Platform. Counter-parties can track each transactional contract entered as well as monitor the level of performance and compliance by the other party.

Agro Trucker

The On-Demand Agro Logistic component, is designed to be a most reliable on- demand delivery and pickup platform for the Agricultural sector. It is a secure and centralized marketplace which enables the onboarding and booking of third-party trucks for purposes of deliveries of agricultural products on location transparent basis. It is a mobile as well as web-based easy to use transportation exchange for the agricultural sector aimed at engendering logistics convenience and efficiency across the agricultural value chain.

Agro Trucker connects agricultural logistics service providers such as fleet owners /truck drivers and transporters with agro producing and buying entities for efficient pickup, transportation and delivery of agricultural produce /products anywhere around sub-Sahara Africa, at the most cost effective prices.  The Agro Trucker also provide users with real-time visibility, cargo-in-transit insurance and proper communication channels.

Some of the key features of the AgroDomain Platform include:

  • International Trade Enablement
  • Multi-Country Marketplace
  • Multi-Currency Transactions
  • Firm & Negotiable Offer/Bids
  • Automated Contract Process
  • Product Delivery Confirmation Tools
  • Dispute Resolution Tools
  • Streamlined KYC Protocols
  • Highest Level of Security
  • Product Retargeting Capabilities
  • Dedicated Accounts Manager
  • Premium Support
  • Integrated Agro Purse/eWallet

As Africa’s population doubles by 2050 and the demand for food and rural jobs escalates, the transformative power of AgroDomain becomes a strategic imperative. We foresee the AgroDomain Platform becoming a catalyst for the digital transformation of the Agricultural ecosystem across sub-Saharan Africa.

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