A Nigerian AgriTech startup, Peatuce, is on a mission to improve local food trade within and across Africa from the ground up.
Founded on February 1, 2018, the startup is set to improve the local food trade within and across Africa by increasing efficiency, service quality and enhancing profitability for farmers, suppliers and buyers.
“We believe in a future where local farmers play a large role in feeding our communities, and we are working to making that a reality. We are focusing on emerging markets with a target of over 20,000 local farmers on our platform in 2018,” Charles Ogbaoku, CEO Peatuce said.
Ogbaoku and Kingley Ebere, who is the Chief Operations Officer say they started Peatuce because of the ageing profile of Afrikan farmers, poor financial livelihood of smallholder farmers, and the continuous increase in global population.
The duo was motivated by the fact that; according to the United Nations, the world’s population will grow from 7,5 billion to nearly 10 billion in 2050. As such, the demand for food will be on the increase, and Africa would have to worry about feeding approximately 1,5 billion people by 2030 and 2 billion by 2050, when in contrast, the continent currently depends largely on external imports to cater for its roughly 1,2 billion people.
In return, they believed in order to help African farmers become more efficient, they developed their digital platform.
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Peatuce, they say will tokenize its operation by implementing block chain technology, creating a decentralized sourcing platform, accessible on a mobile app and web, later in 2018.
“The problem is, the local produce trade has remained under-served by technology, we intend changing that narrative,” Kingsley said.
The AgriTech has already started signing up and helping some farmers in Nigeria become profitable through their distributed platform.
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