What is the name of your organization?
Green Agro Solution PLC
What is the name of your solution?
Lersha: Easy Agriculture
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
A phygital platform delivering bundled services through closed-loop agricultural finance and market linkages.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Ethiopia
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Smallholder farmers across Ethiopia and Africa face fragmented agricultural systems that limit productivity, climate resilience, and financial inclusion. In Ethiopia, agriculture supports over 80% of livelihoods and contributes 31.8% of GDP, yet more than two-thirds of farmers remain credit-constrained while only 8% of formal lending reaches agriculture.
The challenge is not only lack of finance, but the absence of integrated last-mile systems connecting farmers to reliable data, advisory, mechanization, inputs, insurance, and structured markets. Ethiopia’s Digital Agriculture Roadmap and National Agricultural Finance Implementation Roadmap (NAFIR) both identify fragmented farmer data systems, weak market coordination, and limited digital infrastructure as major barriers to scaling agricultural finance and resilience nationwide. Climate shocks further intensify vulnerability, with recurring droughts, erratic rainfall, and rising food insecurity affecting over 22 million people across the Horn of Africa.
Without integrated, data-driven, and market-led agricultural systems, millions of smallholder farmers remain excluded from economic opportunity and climate resilience.
https://youtube.com/shorts/_M-73T_mp6k?si=8muyKzHGJcLr201I
What is your solution?
Lersha is a phygital agricultural platform that connects smallholder farmers to bundled services including data-driven agricultural finance and insurance, climate-smart advisory, mechanization, quality inputs, and structured markets. Our model combines digital infrastructure with a last-mile human network (Lersha Agents) to make agricultural services accessible, trusted, and scalable across rural communities.
The platform operates through mobile and web applications, agent-facing digital tools, dashboards, and a multilingual call center supporting continuous farmer engagement across the agricultural cycle. Using a high-tech, high-touch approach, Lersha combines digital systems with localized field support through a network of over 4,000 agents. To date, the platform has digitally profiled and onboarded nearly 380,000 farmers using farm, geolocation, production, and behavioral data that support credit scoring, advisory delivery, and financial access.
Lersha’s core innovation is a market-led, closed-loop financing model connecting farmers, financial institutions, insurers, input suppliers, and off-takers within one ecosystem. Financing is primarily provided through non-cash, in-kind agricultural support such as inputs and mechanization, while repayment is integrated into structured aggregation and market linkage processes. Supported by digital credit scoring, production planning, and climate-smart advisory, the model helps reduce risk, strengthen repayment performance, and improve productivity and market participation for underserved farmers.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Lersha primarily serves smallholder farmers who are often excluded from formal agricultural finance and reliable markets due to limited documentation, low financial literacy, weak rural infrastructure, and high transaction costs. Our model particularly targets underserved rural communities vulnerable to climate shocks and low agricultural productivity.
Through Lersha, farmers gain access to bundled agricultural services, data-driven credit scoring, climate-smart advisory, and structured market linkages that improve productivity, reduce risk, and increase income. Early implementation results have shown productivity increases of approximately 24%, income improvements of nearly 30%, and repayment rates of 100%, supported by our non-cash financing model, continuous agent follow-up, and multilingual call center engagement.
The solution also creates meaningful rural employment opportunities for over 4,000 youth agents, many of whom come from farming communities themselves, serving as trusted last-mile service providers. Beyond farmers, Lersha supports financial institutions through farmer digitization, credit scoring, and rural portfolio visibility, while enabling anchor firms and aggregators to access more reliable, traceable, and higher-quality supply.
By 2030, Lersha aims to reach 1 million active farmers, advancing our vision of making agriculture easy for everyone.
