Africa’s Food and Agricultural Supply Chain
Scaling opportunities with soft infrastructure 🧠
As two of the most populous countries in its respective regions on the African continent, Nigeria and Kenya have the potential to feed themselves and even export food to other parts of the world. However, this potential remains largely untapped due to a broken food and agricultural supply chain that is plagued by inefficiencies, lack of infrastructure, and inadequate investment.
One of the main problems with the food supply chain in both Nigeria and Kenya is the lack of efficient transportation systems. Many rural areas in both countries are not easily accessible by road, making it difficult for farmers to get their products to market. In addition, the inadequate infrastructure means that it is often easier and cheaper to import food from other countries rather than transporting it within Africa. While building hard infrastructure require significant resources not limited to capital and time, the low hanging opportunity to reinforce Africa’s broken food and agricultural supply chain is in soft infrastructure.
Hard Infrastructure vs Soft Infrastructure
While the former represents physical systems that power the economic and operational systems of nations, including highways, train systems and other physical systems, the latter represents intangible systems and human capital such as policy, digital tools and social systems amongst others.
The Role of Policy
Nigeria recently passed the Nigeria Startup Bill into an Act. An activity in line with a trend of the increasing adoption of policy that seeks to drive innovation and the development of small and medium enterprises.
Of course, policy without implementation is akin to a car without an engine, it’s useless! Thus, active engagement across stakeholders is important to create synergies and exponential growth.
With synergy, investment into hard infrastructure projects like train systems can be accelerated as has been seen with the launch of the Blue Rail Line in Lagos State, Nigeria.
At Farmz2u, our aim is to scale the opportunities in scaling soft infrastructure systems that can scale Africa’s food and agricultural systems with an intial focus on embedded finance and enterprise resource planning solutions.
The lack of storage facilities is another major issue in both Nigeria and Kenya. Many farmers do not have access to proper storage facilities, which means that their produce often goes to waste. This not only reduces the availability of food but also results in financial losses for the farmers. Like the transportation challenge, soft infrastructure can mitigate the challenges created by poor storage facilities.
The Role of Digital Tools
For instance, consider the role of a ‘just in time’ inventory system in improving the planning accuracy for production. If a digital tool can accurately estimate the volume that a Buyer like Nestle needs to produce one of its products, let’s assume Golden Morn, to fulfil a quarterly production target of 100,000 units of 100kg Golden Morn bags by March 2023, waste from poor storage can be mitigated. The production plan of Growers responsible for providing the raw materials to produce 100,000 units of Golden Morn can be tailored to ensure production output closely matches the Buyer’s demand.
Overall, the broken food and agricultural supply chain in Africa is a major barrier to food security and economic development. To address this issue, there needs to be a concerted effort to develop infrastructure (hard and soft) and invest in the sector. Only then will Africa’s full potential be realized to ensure a food-secure continent and subsequently a food secure world.
At Farmz2u, we are building the operational engine for growers, suppliers and buyers. We believe in the power of technology accelerating value creation in the agricultural sector thus ensuring food security on the African continent.
