Growing business for farmers in Africa

Felix Musau was born in a farming community in Kenya. Growing up, he saw farmers in his rural town face numerous challenges. Most of the small-scale farmers weren’t able to access key services, such as finance, insurance and inputs for farming, including seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and farming equipment. They had large asset bases, but they weren’t able to extract the right value from them.

That’s when Felix developed a solution. Combining the accessibility of mobile phones with the power of cloud computing, Felix developed AGIN. AGIN is a mobile and cloud-based service that connects farmers to much-needed money. Using mobile phones, farmers can capture information like farm size, location, soil composition and crops grown. Service providers across the agricultural value chain, including banks and insurance companies, can then use this information to offer productivity-enhancing goods and services to farmers. As a result, AGIN helps farmers establish a credit profile, allowing them to access resources like small loans, with credit lines they can use without ever visiting a bank.

AGIN has served over 140,000 farmers in Kenya and facilitated over $1.3 million per month in transactions, including loans and insurance. After receiving financial and technical support from Microsoft 4Afrika, AGIN now has hopes to expand its reach to 300 million farmers in sub-Saharan Africa over the next four years.