Nigerian startup Farmcrowdy has recently added two more awards to its growing haul of accolades. The company was named agritech platform of the year at the 2018 edition of the Nigeria Technology Awards, which held on Saturday, November 1. Its CEO, Onyeka Akumah, also won the tech entrepreneur of the year award.
Members of the Farmcrowdy team were at the Ace Olivia Hall in Lagos’s City Mall, venue of the event, to receive the awards. They have described it as a positive conclusion to the year for them, and say that it’s motivated them to do even better in 2019.
Farmcrowdy is receiving these awards in what is just its second year in business. Founded in 2016, the platform gives Nigerians the chance to sponsor local farmers, in exchange for a share of farmers’ earnings from their farm produce. It leverages digital technology to connect willing sponsors to profitable farms across several states in the country.
This latest recognition comes at the end of a year in which Farmcrowdy has recorded a series of successes. It extended its operations to new regions, including Kaduna and Kwara, bringing its reach nationwide to ten states. It began looking beyond local investors, to Nigerians in the diaspora who might be interested in sponsoring farms back home. A referral program for maize farm sponsors was expanded to include rice farm investors. And it set up a new office in Abuja, to make it easier for its staff to reach its projects further north.
These accomplishments have come on the heels of major investor funding which the startup announced in December 2017 and early in 2018. Farmcrowdy notched up a $325,000 grant from GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator at the start of this year, just a few months after clinching $1 million in seed funding from a group of investors led by Social Capital, Cox Ventures and Techstars Ventures.
Farmcrowdy has also taken a number of other awards throughout the year. In May, it was presented with the National Productivity Order of Merit (NPOM) by President Muhammadu Buhari at the National Productivity Awards Ceremony. The following month, it took away the Digital Business of the Year Award in Africa, at the annual Global African Business Awards held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. And at the AppsAfrica award which took place in South Africa in November, the startup won the Best African Agritech Solution award.
This year’s victories, though significant, are not unusual for Farmcrowdy. In 2017, it harvested a similarly impressive set of awards, including from the Nigeria Technology Award, where it scooped three (one of those was the Agritech Company of the Year award, which it’s retained in 2018). It took the agro innovator of the year award at the National Agriculture Awards, and it was one of ten global startups selected for the Techstars Atlanta 2017 Batch.
The Nigeria Technology Awards is held annually to recognize the contributions of entrepreneurs, academics and government to the adoption and widespread use of technology in tackling Nigeria’s contemporary challenges.
Featured Image Source: Innovation Village
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