EZ-Farming, Nigeria’s fast-rising agritech start-up has won the 2019 Georgetown African Business Conference new venture competition, hosted by the Young African Professionals in Washington DC.
The agritech start-up also won the peoples’ choice award at the at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
EZ-Farming beat other six finalists to win the $5,000 first prize money for the competition.
Adewale Oparinde, founder of EZ-Farming, said that the feat is another testament to the work put in by the agritech start-up in firming up the base for the investments in Nigeria’s agricultural sector.
“We are really delighted to have won the contest here in Washington DC. It is our first outing after several months of inventing our business model to meet the demands and dynamics of the market. We took our time since 2015 to conduct thorough research in designing our business model,” Oparinde said in a statement.
“The glory goes first to our farmers and to our investors in Africa and the diaspora, who appreciate the work we do and have reposed confidence in our model.
“It is important to us that we build a sustainable business that is most trusted by our investor community and which can last beyond the current era of hype. We are a platform beyond money, investor and farmer,” he said.
He noted that there is currently no existing platform in the sector connecting old and young people together for intergenerational transfer of knowledge for the next generation of farmers, saying EZ-Farm is bridging the gap through its platform.
“We also connect our farmers and value chain actors to land and extra spaces, therefore, making us an excellent platform for people to monetize their resources,” he added.
According to him, EZ-Farming is the first agritech intergenerational platform crowd-funding to scale small farms into commercial sizes while connecting unemployed youth with experienced farmers via internships-and-funds to start their own farms.
Reiterating that the platform has one of the highest ROIs across various investment options in the agritech space, he said that it was made possible by EZ-Farming’s unique model that uses data to identify the best farmers who have potential to scale and especially the business peculiar financial engineering framework and a commitment to sharing great proceeds with our investors.
“It is also made possible by a model that guarantees that farmers adopt up-to-date Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), making them export-ready.”
Josephine Okojie
