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  Fresh out of Covenant University with a Bachelor’s in Biochemistry, Uka Eje never envisaged that his burning desire to solve problems in the agricultural sector would birth a solution for thousands of farmers around the continent. However, today, it should come as no surprise that all the steps he took towards identifying and tackling the problems plaguing farmers would yield such substantial results.
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Uka started his entrepreneurial journey by conducting thorough research on how he could provide value for smallholder farmers in Nigeria. Through his research, he was able to ascertain that Nigerian farmers lack access to funds, standard inputs, and data to conduct analysis on yields and make amendments where possible. To proffer a solution to these problems, he co-founded Thrive Agric with his friend, Ayodeji Arikawe, in 2017. Speaking on why he started Thrive Agric, the entrepreneur said:
“I grew up in a farming community, and I figured that the farmers lacked two major things. One, access to capital to scale up their production and two, easy access to a ready market to absorb their produce. We built Thrive Agric as a solution to these problems.“
Through Thrive Agric, over 18,500 farmers have recorded more yields which translate to more money, and the people who fund these farms have made great returns on their investments.
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Thrive Agric has been a part of notable programs such as Google Launchpad Accelerator, Y Combinator, and the University of Leeds’ Future of Food Programme, which has contributed to the startup’s success in tackling problems in the African agricultural sector. Uka hopes that by 2022, Thrive Agric will become a solution provider for over a million farmers. He has also emphasised his interest in forming partnerships that will help scale Thrive Agric beyond Nigeria.
“I want to be able to build a healthy partnership with the right people, so we can scale what we are doing even beyond Nigeria. For instance, I am already having conversations around; access to technology partners for mechanised farming to enable us to scale, access to more lenders to provide capital to be deployed to the farms, and insurance tech to secure the farmers’ future,“
says Uka. Sources: Cmbglobe Techmoran Featured Image Source: Techgist Africa
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This article was first published on 8th July 2020

samuelokoruwa

My name is Samuel Okoruwa. I am an ardent researcher, reading is life and writing is fun.


Comments (1)

One thought on “Websites We Love: Thrive Agric”

  • Xya

    were you paid? because uka eje has defrauded his investors and you are drawing traffic to his site.

    “As operations pick up, so will payments. Payouts will be made in order of the maturity dates of the original farm subscription, but no more than 12 months in arrears. For example, our earliest farm subscriptions were due in April 2020, they will get paid first, followed by subscriptions due in May 2020, and so on. We say 12 months because it will take two full farming seasons for the business to fully recover and we prefer to make a promise we can confidently keep.”

    they were not paying but kept crowd funding money

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