Nigerian startup Rural Farmers Hub is helping farmers, corporates and industries to make better agribusiness decisions through data-driven and precision advisory services on improving crop yield and market linkages, focused on post-insurgency areas.
Founded in 2018 by Segun Adegun and Gabriel Eze, Rural Farmers Hub has developed a product called Capture, which has been used by over 25,000 farmers in 10 states in northern Nigeria.
“We are very active in the north-east as we contribute towards rebuilding communities post-insurgency,” said Adegun.
Yield productivity in Africa has been declining for three decades for most crops, with the productivity of grains in Africa less than half the global average. Meanwhile, farmers lack access to the latest – and climate-smart – information, leading to an inability to improve yield, and increase income.
Rural Farmers Hub addresses these issues. Its core product offering is Capture, a crop and soil health advisory service, for which it charges farmers per hectare or per season.
“Once farmers have been registered on our platform, we are also able to offer them additional agricultural services based on their needs,” said Adegun.
“In the medium term, there are plans to introduce additional services such as data mining and warehousing, off-taking, micro-finance, agri-insurance, agro-chemical sales, fertiliser sales, and installation and rental of IoT to monitor pests and crop intrusion on a regional scale.”
A participant in the Africa Startup Initiative Programme (ASIP), Rural Farmers Hub has since raised a pre-seed round US$500,000. It is currently raising a seed round, for which it has a US$5 million target.
