Desert Green Africa, Addressing Food Security in the Agricultural Value Chain

Faith Chiloane, Founder, Desert Green Africa

Desert Green Africa helps bring youth back to agriculture through its business-linked value chain products, Desert Green and Greencart. DesertGreen is a farming app that provides automated real-time crop nutrition, extension support, machinery and labor sharing for smallholder farmers.

Greenkart, meanwhile, is an informal merchant app that connects street vendors directly with Desert Green Africa’s network of smallholder farmers for on-demand fresh produce delivery and cold storage, allowing merchants to ‘just order’ to match their daily sales.

“With more than 60% of the world’s arable land on the continent, a cluster of farmers, a large number of informal traders, the world’s smallest population, Africa can play a leading role in addressing the world’s food security crisis. And with less annual food waste than enough to feed every hungry person.” There are many problems that affect farmers and traders, but we have chosen the three most practical problems to solve: firstly, the lack of technical resources, including scientific knowledge for farmers and extension officers, as well as the high costs of machinery for farmers.

“Secondly, there is no market access which creates many issues as it is a major requirement in retail, which leads to additional issues such as mismatched demand/supply between farmers and traders and high cost of logistics. And finally, lack of access to finance such as lack of collateral; Lack of verification of transactions, as they are not creditworthy – affects farmers and traders,” Chilone explains.

Here, we chat with Chiloan to learn more about Desert Green Africa, the challenges the company faces and a few trends shaping the industry.

Briefly tell us about Desert Green Africa.

Desert Green is an agritech startup that develops mobile solutions to improve the informal agricultural value chain in Africa. We are currently based in Sandton, Gauteng, mainly operating in Joburg and Pretoria as the largest consumer product market in the country.

Greencart is our current focus product. A B2B marketplace for smallholder farmers to sell their fresh produce directly to informal traders, enabling traders to get direct delivery to their market stalls within 24 hours of placing an order at an affordable farm-gate price, with shared logistics services. .

How and why did you start?

We started the business in 2016 with the aim of building a crop nutrition platform to help smallholder farmers improve their production and quality to provide guaranteed demand to large retailers. After securing some discount deals from retailers and wholesalers, we quickly realized that many small farmers were unable to take advantage of these benefits due to limited infrastructure and investment to comply with retail certifications. Farmers were still selling the product, so we decided to follow the value chain.

As in other African countries, the majority of South African farmers are smallholder farmers, up to 93 percent. These farmers rely on informal market channels to sell their produce and are also more responsible for food security at the household level.

The problem? In South Africa and Africa in general, there is a significant demand/supply relationship between informal traders and smallholder farmers. Demand/supply of clean produce is unpredictable and unpredictable in the informal value chain, causing a lot of uncertainty for traders. Loss of income for farmers; Unstable prices and produce waste along the value chain.

We believe this can be done in a cheaper, faster and more transparent way than is currently the case. That is why we are building mobile solutions to enable small farmers and informal traders to buy directly from one of the farm gate prices.

Tell us about your app.

For Greencart, our current focus product, we are looking at USSD integration to accommodate feature phone users, creating a web-based platform to place orders seamlessly. One of our key features is to geo-map informal traders who are close to each other and mostly clustered in cities, allowing them to buy fresh produce from nearby farmers for better prices. Also, if a farmer cannot execute an order alone, they can invite other farmers based on geo-location to execute orders as a group.

Can you share some of the key challenges you faced while establishing your business?

The problem we are trying to solve is a double-edged sword and trust is the most important currency in the informal value chain. Both farmers and traders are used to working offline and doing transactions themselves, so they are hesitant to adopt new ways of working until they see the benefits.

How would you like to see Desert Green Africa grow or improve in the coming years?

We plan to grow Desert Green Africa into a full service provider from crop nutrition to market access using mobile money payments. The aim is to improve the efficiency of fresh produce sold through a network of farmers and traders along the value chain to ultimately impact or reduce prices and improve food security in Africa.

As an entrepreneur, what would you like to see change in the South African startup landscape?

The funding landscape in South Africa and Africa in general needs to adapt to funding technology startups with an infrastructure component because that is the nature of the problems most startups are solving across Africa. We are solving problems by building the infrastructure that governments should have built to reach our customers and if investor sentiment can meet us halfway, Africa will produce many more unicorns and have a lasting impact, especially in the agritech space.

What trends do you foresee for the industry?

The informal agricultural value chain is big business in Africa, with more than 60 percent of trade occurring informally, valued at over $30 billion in the SADC region alone, and expected to increase with urbanization. The future food system in Africa is fragmented and decentralized as more than 70% of Africa’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050 and we are building a strong case for decentralized retail and fresh produce in Africa to help. ‘Feed the Future’

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs?

Love the problem first before the product or solution. When you live and breathe the problem you’re trying to solve, you’re more likely to build a product market faster, cheaper, and more effectively than many competitors who are prematurely attracted to products and features.

Also, if you’re more wedded to the problem than the solution, you’re more likely to get feedback, to iterate quickly when it matters most.

Where would you like to see Africa turn green in the next five years?

Over the next five years, we would like to see Desert Green Africa operating in all major agricultural provinces in South Africa (Mpumalanga, Limpopo, KwaZulu Natal, Gauteng and North West) as well as some of our key neighboring markets, particularly Zambia. Zimbabwe, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with our full range of products from farm to market.