Mercy Corps AgriFin announced during the 2021 online Learning Event (ALE) the winners of the “Use of Digital Data to serve Smallholder farmers” award. This year the award has actually gone to three different organisations.
The first of those is Kenya Agricultural Livestock and Research Organisation (KALRO) in Kenya, who worked with multiple providers to combine their data and support the incubation of a number of services on their platform. The second is Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) in Ethiopia, who have been working over a number of years to digitize data within their organisation and are increasingly combining those into the ATA data hub that’s being used to support decision making and greater intelligence, but also the support of agricultural commercialisation clusters which are reaching many millions of farmers now.
“The third [award winner in this category] is eProd Solutions who is a leading ERP and digitization service provider and they have been working to crowd in a number of other service providers using the data from their clients to illustrate the potential of serving smallholder farmers in terms of credit, weather information and advisory services, among others.” Matt Shakhovskoy, Senior Advisor at ISF Advisors and advisory committee member with the Mercy Corps AgriFin program.
We are very proud to have been selected to win the “Use of Digital Data to serve Smallholders” award at #AgriFinALE2021 as recognition of our contribution to the agricultural sector in developing countries.
B2B marketing of supply chain management platforms: How can we measure socio-economic impact to attract impact investors?
In 2016, eProd Solutions first had discussions with Mercy Corps AgriFin through Sieka Gatabaki. The discussions looked at how, as an IT company, eProd Solutions can create value to attract investors. Investors are often interested in creating socioeconomic impact or environmental impact, and the question came as to how to prove that in a case like eProd Solutions that apply a B2B (business to business) sales model.
Mid-last year, we had the opportunity through AgrFin to partner with and 60 decibels to study the potential impact that we actually achieve. In collaboration with one of the long-term clients of eProd Solutions at the coast of Kenya. Busara studied a longitudinal database and 60 Decibels interviewed hundreds of farmers which resulted in very valuable insights and reports that we have been able to share with potential investors. Hopefully, this will lead to raise the capital that we need to finance our continuous expansion.