Our Resources

Follow us on our journey to build an Africa that feeds herself and the world.

resource img
Company News

March 23, 2023

Post-CoVid: How ThriveAgric is building an Africa that can feed itself and the world.

Growing up in agrarian Benue State, Uka Eje was not alien to the challenges smallholder farmers in Africa faced. What he didn't know was how solving those challenges would change not only his life, but also the lives of millions of farmers across Africa through his startup, ThriveAgric. ThriveAgric currently grows over 5% of the maize consumed in Nigeria, contributing about 50% to the national grains reserve in 2022. The company also developed the agricultural operating system (AOS), a software that has enabled over half a million farmers to access over $60 million in funding in 2022.

Eje and his cofounder, Ayo Arikawe had known each other since they were in Covenant University in 2008, but they didn't start ThriveAgric until 2018 when a friend from school complained to Eje about his factory's needs for quality soybeans. Eje told Arikawe about this friend who offered to buy any amount of soybean they could provide. The request was music to their ears since farmers in Eje's hometown who were constantly losing over 40% of their harvest as a result of poor storage facilities, needed a channel to sell their produce. After crowdfunding $6,000 from close friends and family, Eje went around farms in Benue to aggregate three trucks of Soybeans, which they supplied to the factory in Lagos.

This experience influenced the company's adoption of a crowdfunding model. Individuals and international organizations saw how ThriveAgric leveraged technology to improve food security and began investing. Until December 2019, when COVID19 struck. The resulting movement restrictions which occurred at the height of onboarding farmers, meant a disruption in the supply of much needed poultry farm inputs. What followed were failures in the poultry operations, reduction in production level, and consequently drastic decrease in product demand and revenue. Also, the majority of the food processors, off takers, who bought the finished produce from farmers, reduced their production level during the pandemic, and when they received supplies were not able to pay as when due. This affected the demand for farm products drastically and resulted in a drastic decrease in revenue.

ThriveAgric was caught in the crosshairs of this predicament and hundreds of unpaid, angry retail investors protested the resulting re-payment delay. With ThriveAgric's existence threatened, the team had to restructure its operations and even Eje stepped down from being CEO. In this article, you'll find the not-so-glamorous behind the scenes of the pandemic that almost took ThriveAgric under. But more than that, you'll get to follow the journey of ThriveAgric's rise to a multinational organization building an Africa that can feed itself and the world.

The CoVID19 Downturn

Anna Ahmed, one of ThriveAgric's farmers, lost over 1000 birds due to movement restriction.“It was a difficult period losing my birds in the middle of the pandemic,” Ahmed said. While the losses incurred varied among the farmers, depending on the capacity of their pens, ThriveAgric shared that there were over 400,000 mature birds that had no buyers. Despite efforts the team made to rent more cold rooms for storage of processed chickens, the lack of buyers and difficulty in moving the birds during the pandemic meant that over 90% of the birds were lost.

With revenue falling, and a prolonged delay in paying the retail investors back, many individual investors took to social media to vent their frustrations. Though the team was crestfallen, they gave no room for discouragement. Recalling that period, Eje said, "We were building for the long term, so we knew we were going to face short-term challenges. As much as that was painful, I never thought that was going to be the end of the company. We had to ask ourselves. Why were we doing this?"

ThriveAgric's vision was driven by a fragmented African agriculture system; with farmers on one end of the value chain, financiers, insurance companies in another, produce buyers in another, input providers in yet another end of the value chain. The players wanted to be a part of the value chain and benefit from each other but they didn't understand how best this could happen. 

In retrospect, Eje said, "Our goal was to change the entire scope of Africa’s agriculture by bringing them all together. We weren't going to allow the pandemic steal that from us''

Strengthening The team 

 Arikawe and Eje re-shared their vision with the team. Eventually, everyone was motivated to tackle the unique challenges the pandemic brought. They also identified gaps in human capital and they hired experienced quality supply chain professionals across finance, risk and commercial operations. 

New Risk Officer, Michael Kadiri, ensured that all business units complied with  every company policy laid out. The company also started routine audits of all processes to identify and correct areas of weaknesses. At the end of this exercise  Oshone Anavhe, the Vice President of farm operations and Adetoro Akindele, the Vice President of Commercial operations joined the team.

Talking about that period, Arikawe explained, "We identified deficiencies in our structure, strengthened different parts of our teams and worked on improving communication with our investors. In less than 6 months we had settled all obligations, built a stronger team and almost 5x the revenue".

Scaling Partnerships

As part of the lessons learned during the COVID19 period, it became obvious crowdfunding wasn't a sustainable funding option. To scale, the company needed patient capital and funds from institutionalized investors.

This led to investment partnerships with a number of commercial banks, the World Food Program, Visa, USAID and the Central Bank of Nigeria. The company recently emerged as the West African winners of the annual AYuTe Africa Challenge, receiving a $1 million prize to scale up their impact with smallholder farmers.

Scaling Smallholder farmers 

In the last four years, ThriveAgric has impacted  over 540,000 farmers across 4 countries, tripling their productivity and doubling their income. Oshone Anavhe, VP of Operations, shared how ThriveAgric has enabled thousands of farmers post-covid, " Our focus is on smallholder subsistence farmers. People who farm day to day for their daily bread in under-served communities, rural environments,” Anavhe says. “By providing access to credit, in the form of quality input, to expand their farming operations and direct access to the market to reduce post-harvest loss, we eliminate middle men and break the chain of unprofitability."

To successfully achieve these, ThriveAgric needed a way to secure funding for its farmers despite the lack of visibility, high illiteracy rates and nil collateral. It was obvious that the traditional finance and lending system wasn't designed for them, hence the team started looking to build its proprietary technology, the Agricultural Operating System (AOS).

Scaling Finance with Technology

Before the AOS, financiers looking to provide credit for smallholder farmers in agribusinesses were skeptical. For one, there was no proof of credibility. Without a credit score or even a means of identification for many of the farmers in the rural regions, it was hard to build visibility, monitor the loans or perform some sort of risk assessment. 

However, with the AOS, these financiers could log into the platform to access the data they need to invest wisely. With the information from the AOS platform, farmers could also directly access the funds needed to scale. 

With ThriveAgric’s flagship product; the Agricultural Operating System, other agribusinesses who intend to subscribe to the AOS can easily gain access to funding from banks because of the recently embedded feature of Bank verification and Credit scoring report of which it is a necessity for any agribusiness to obtain loan from the banks.

Beyond providing access to farmers, the AOS serves as a one-stop shop for farmers' needs. The digital tool aggregates all the players and processes in the agricultural value chain. The system registers farmers and generates an ID for them, giving visibility to previously obscure farmers. 

Daniel Olorunfemi, ThriveAgric's Products Lead explains how the AOS helps farmers in rural communities access the funds they need to scale, "The AOS serves as a database for financial institutions to access information about farmers they want to support. It also helps to map each farmer’s field in the different rural regions through geo-coordinates to avoid duplicate entries."

With the AOS harvesting monitoring tool, financial institutions can set parameters to monitor their investments and get detailed reports. The inventory management system also serves as a synchronized platform and as a SaaS tool, businesses can subscribe to different offerings of the AOS to grow their businesses.

Scaling: The Future 

The team's resolve has led to the growth of an agribusiness that produces over 800,000 metric tonnes of grains; impacting over 2800 communities across 26 states in Nigeria and directly employing over 2,500 people (indirectly engaging over 40,000 youths all over Africa.

Temiyeoluwa Alabi, the Communications Lead at ThriveAgric, highlights the plans for the future,  “Having recorded an enviable success in the last 4 years, our goal is to ensure we replicate the success in other African states. Our goal is to build an inclusive African agricultural ecosystem in a bid to see a food-secured continent while empowering smallholder farmers who play a major role in the value chain.”

With the giant strides ThriveAgric has made since the COVID19 pandemic, it is clear it was a mere setback and a stepping stone to a brighter future. However, a food-sustainable Africa can be only achieved when there are joint efforts to unlock the full potential of agriculture from the community  – agricultural enthusiasts, investors, FMCGs, agribusinesses and you. Find out how you can contribute to this vision of building an Africa that can feed itself and the world here.

Share via:logologologo