AquaFarmsAfrica

AquaFarms Africa is committed to addressing the problems of food security and food sovereignty across Africa by making urban agriculture broadly accessible through a unique social franchising model, unlocking the wealth opportunity in the food space for local entrepreneurs and reducing carbon imprints from food importation and logistics.

Our adaptation of social franchising allows us to build food sovereignty through local ownership of the value chain, thereby creating jobs, sharing wealth and reducing women and youth unemployment in urban areas. By combining aquaponics with social franchising, our model makes urban farming accessible, commercializable and scalable.

On the continent of Africa, at least 70% of food products are imported and only 24% of African countries have developed a specialization in food export. And the food market is set to triple by 2030, representing approximately 1 trillion dollars USD. 

Africa is home to the youngest population in the world with over 600 million under the age of 25. As of now, 72% of African youth are under or unemployed and 11 million youths are expected to enter the labor market every year for the next decade. Although agriculture is often lauded as Africa’s greatest potential for job creation, youth are often left out of the equation despite being the largest unemployed population on the continent.  Because very few support services exist within a depressed private sector, a new entrepreneur must manage the entire farming value chain, which is difficult and costly for startups. Lack of investment in agriculture and lack of access to capital has accelerated rural exodus and congested urban areas. 

Our solution sustainably reduces the use of precious resources, reduces importation and increases profitability of local production, in order to promote the agricultural sector as an attractive option for investment and decent employment for youth.

AquaFarms Africa’s aquaponic system is a sustainable, affordable and simple soil-less alternative to traditional farming. Our 12 x 12 meter systems use renewable energy to allow for climate-controlled farming thus facilitating year-round harvesting, increasing availability and access to nutritious foods, while also producing normally imported niche products, enticing importers to purchase locally.

By sustainably providing high-value products to our target customers, we not only increase food accessibility, but also food sovereignty as we compete with imports at better rates and quicker delivery, boosting the revenue of our urban farmers and creating decent employment for youth.

Our tech-enabled social franchise model provides a “business-in-a-box” to young entrepreneurs, allowing new entrepreneurs to focus on production, while AquaFarms Africa manages other areas of the operational value chain such as procurement, quality control, marketing, sales and logistics.  Our proprietary technology allows our franchisees to better manage their sites as well as enables us to manage quality control and logistics at lower costs. Our franchises also are easily scalable and offer a transparent investment model for diaspora, increasing local access to capital.

AquaFarms Africa not only sustainably addresses accessibility to healthy food, but also the need to boost youth employment faced in urban areas.

AFA seeks to address Africa’s women and urban youth unemployment problem and food insecurity, while simultaneously introducing a profitable and clean farming practice into urban areas and stimulating local economies. AFA’s founding members have spent the last decade in West Africa specifically using human centered design to answer the question: how might we reduce the youth unemployment rate in West Africa while developing local entrepreneurial ecosystems? We have held mind mapping, open space and ideation process workshops every year over the last 6 years in communities across Guinea, Benin and Ghana. 

This internal knowledge led us to work with a cohort of young women in Conakry to design an easy to use and affordable aquaponics system: a simple tech and high impact solution to urban farming. By providing youth with opportunities to launch aquaponics systems through an adapted social franchise concept, we give them access to technical knowledge, access to more lucrative markets, access to capital, access to low cost inputs and access to a logistics chain. By using tech solutions to bring a finished product to niche markets in a farm to table chain, we are addressing their concerns of food sovereignty and security, unemployment, income and environmental sustainability.

By making urban agriculture broadly accessible through AFA’s tech-enabled aquaponics system, we provide lucrative opportunities in the food space to women and youth, while reducing carbon imprints from food importation.

With our locally made and cost efficient systems, our franchisees are able to sustainably produce fish and normally imported, high-value, niche produce, in proximity to the client. We produce to order and deliver daily, eliminating food waste and the need for cold room storage. Excess produce is offered to the surrounding community at low cost, increasing nutritious food options. 

AFA is innovative in three ways: our approach to farming in urban cities, our business model and our target market. Our model makes urban aquaponics farming accessible, commercializable and scalable.

Across Africa, countries like Guinea, have fast growing urban areas with limited job opportunities and traditional spaces for agriculture. AFA's aquaponic system is an affordable and simple soilless alternative to traditional farming. Our ability to place our 12x12 meter systems throughout urban cities, allows us to penetrate local niche markets while creating employment, include urban youth in the agricultural conversation and transform cityscapes. AFA not only sustainably addresses accessibility to healthy and sustainable food production, but also the need to boost youth employment in urban areas. 

Our adaptation of social franchising allows us to build food sovereignty through  local ownership of the value chain, thereby creating jobs, sharing wealth and reducing youth unemployment in urban areas. Our concept gives new entrepreneurs a business-in-a box opportunity, allowing them to focus on production, while AFA manages other areas of the operational value chain such as site selection, procurement, marketing, sales and logistics. Our franchises also offer an easy and transparent investment model for the diaspora, increasing local access to capital. 

And we offer speedy farm-to-table delivery of high-value produce to target customers – hotels, restaurants, supermarkets and corporations – which allows young urban farmers to obtain greater incomes and repatriate monies spent in international markets. Our target market gives us the ability to develop a regular and reliable customer base.

AquaFarms Africa has developed a new application of aquaponics.  

Our innovation is in our hardware, designed to be affordable and easily scalable, as well as our business model. While containerized hydroponics systems are often prohibitively expensive, we have engineered a lower cost alternative. Through our social franchising concept as well as using our adapted tech-enabled solutions for operations and quality control management, we create a shared economy that allows us to scale quickly and efficiently at low cost while creating opportunities for urban employment.

In order to manage a fleet of AquaFarms in a context with limited quality control as well as access to information, land, capital and business services, we use a proprietary SAS platform and IOT devices that allow our AquaFarmers to monitor the vitals of their system such as temperature and nutrient levels, as well as more easily manage the administrative and accounting processes of their company. AFA is able to also provide franchises procurement, quality control, continued training, logistics management and customer relationship management at a lower cost. 

Aquaponics is not a new concept. It has been used around the world for centuries. We are making aquaponics scalable, commercialisable and accessible through our tech enabled social franchise model.

While franchised tech-enabled hydroponics farming is starting to pick up speed in the Western world and there are some examples in Africa, we have not yet seen tech-enabled aquaponics farming, which is guaranteed organic, more cost efficient and more profitable. In Africa, the industry has not yet found a proven model to scale aquaponics.

Find here a research paper supporting the case for scaling community aquaponics farming, which is similar to our concept in that we are creating a network of shared resources to decrease cost, increase profitability and make scaling simpler. 

 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e0fe/40fab0373a2b8f64262ec4a5d6574c97f822.pdf

AFA’s mission is to successfully commercialize aquaponics farming throughout Africa by making the technology both scalable and accessible in a way that enhances wealth and wellbeing in local communities. Our vision is to reshape Africa’s economic destiny by using Aquaponics as a tool to catalyze food sovereignty across the continent. 

To attain our mission and vision, we train African youth to own and operate a 12 x 12 meter AquaFarm franchise.  

In doing so, we provide access to affordable agricultural technology to locally produce high value, niche products which are normally imported.  In the short term, this solution reduces production costs and increases per meter productivity, increasing profits. By providing niche products in proximity to our clients, we repatriate monies lost to importation, giving youth greater access to lucrative markets. Through our adapted social franchise model, we manage the operational chain, allowing franchisees to focus on production, which reduces barriers to entry for new entrepreneurs by using technology to make managing the value chain easily accessible and less expensive, giving young unemployed African decent income through reducing costs and accessing markets.  

Through these interventions, an AquaFarmer and his team make 10 times the average income of a local farmer. With the implantation of an AquaFarm, local communities in proximity have access to health and clean produce and fish products through the excess production of AquaFarms. Our solution transforms the wealth and wellbeing of local communities by significantly increasing the income of its youth and women as well as providing sustainable sources of nutritious food.

In the medium term, our social franchising concept attracts capital investment from the diaspora, by providing investors with a simple, transparent and lucrative investment model. 

In the long-term, our solution eradicates imports to Africa, reducing carbon emissions due to logistics as well as energy used in traditional irrigation.  More importantly, Africa OWNS its own supply chains for fresh produce. We envision communities that are economically empowered to enact change. With higher incomes, youth and women have greater voice in their communities and can actively participate in the development of their country.

Our prototype is currently serving 10 people directly.  In one year, with investment funds, we will be serving 1280 people directly. In year 5, our business will be serving 50,000 people directly across 5 West African capital cities: Conakry, Dakar, Abidjan, Accra and Lagos.

People directly served include AFA staff, AquaFarmers/Franchisees, and the community members in direct proximity to an AquaFarm.

Within the next year we plan to take the lessons learned from our prototype to build out a market version of our AquaFarm, develop our proprietary app to manage the systems and scale to 15 franchises to cover the Guinean market. Within 5 years, we look to have 1800 franchises operating across 5 West African countries: Guinea, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria.

The barriers we will face over the next year will be focused on capital constraints. These barriers exist at 2 levels. First, R&D is expensive and in order to continuously improve our technology and continuously make it more cost effective, we need injections of investment capital. Secondly, in order for us to be able to create employment for local youth and scale, we need to find financial partners willing to invest in AquaFarms and/or provide debt capital to AquaFarmers.  Across West Africa there is a general lack of capital investment and capital markets which limits business growth.  There is also a high rate of youth unemployment. With a lack of employment opportunities, entrepreneurship becomes the next option. However, start-up companies generally are not positioned for debt capital and banking institutions generally provide collateral based loans and therefore most young people do not have the resources to obtain loans.  Loans from microfinance institutions and traditional banks are very expensive. 

Currently we are seeking partnerships with DFI’s, such as the World Bank and UNDP, to guarantee funds to back in loans for AquaFarmers in order to reduce the risk to banks and reduce the interest rates as well as invest in R&D for our model.  

We also will launch a heavy marketing campaign to promote the AquaFarm franchise model to the diaspora as a simple, transparent and profitable investment in African economic development. We are also seeking institutional investors, such as to provide loans to our AquaFarmers. 

The repayment of the loans is guaranteed by the market we have already secured to end buyers. We currently supply to 3 top restaurants in Guinea and have secured promises to purchase from the largest hotel in Guinea once we have increased our capacity to produce. The data from our current prototype shows an AquaFarmer paying back a loan in 12-18 months. 

We have 3 director level staff:  CEO, CFO and COO. We have 4 full-time staff members and 2 part-time staff members.

AquaFarms Africa is led by a “dream team”. Co-founder and CEO, Wiatta Thomas, a member of Harambe Class of 2020 (https://www.harambeans.com/), has spent the last 8 years building the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Guinea. Co-founder and COO, Bequita Mahama has aquaponic technical expertise with 5 years of experience in designing and building aquaponics systems in Ghana and in the United States. Nnamdi Chiekwu, executive board member and CFO at AFA, is a finance entrepreneur with a decade of experience advising institutional investors and fund managers on private equity fund placements and transactions.  Beyond our collective experience on the continent, we each hold a deep passion for African economic freedom of our people.  This is the driving force behind our desire to promote food sovereignty and wealth generation.

AquaFarms Africa currently has 3 key partnerships :

Vivendi (https://www.vivendi.com/en/)  is a French media group owning multiple green spaces across Africa in capital cities called “Blue Zones” or “Villages Vivendi” which offer sports, recreation and innovation spaces to the general public.  Through this partnership, AFA has access to renewable energy, clean water, as well as prime property space at significantly reduced costs in 10 West African capitals including where we are 

Bolloré Logistics (https://www.bollore.com/en/) is an international shipping company which provides AFA with donated shipping containers to build out storage space, cold rooms and nurseries to support our logistics chain

Dare to Innovate (http://daretoinnovate.com/) is a business incubator based in Guinea, Benin and Ghana, who has provided AFA with training and capacity building support for our staff and AquaFarmers through their partnerships with DFI’s.

AquaFarms Africa has adapted the traditional social franchising model to accommodate the needs of the African context. Often across West Africa, a new entrepreneur is forced to manage the entire operational value chain, which is difficult and costly. Our concept gives new entrepreneurs a  “business-in-a box” opportunity allowing them to focus on production, while AquaFarms Africa the rest of the operational value chain such as training, installation, site selection, input procurement, quality control, marketing, sales and logistics to the end market. Making our solutions accessible gives us the opportunity to build food sovereignty through local ownership of the value chain; thereby creating jobs, sharing wealth and reducing youth unemployment in urban areas.

Our model is designed for urban city centers where AFA farms can be implanted close to our customers (hotels, restaurants, and supermarkets). Close proximity to customers allows for speedy farm-to-table delivery of fresh produce that is usually expensive to import. 

A significant aspect of AFA’s business model is to retain its operational standards and cultural DNA, while primarily expanding into larger West African markets, and subsequently throughout the continent. The social franchise concept allows for this expansion to occur quickly and with less cost, due to the mobile design of our aquaponics systems as well as the transfer of expertise in operating markets.  

 Our 3 main streams of income include selling produce from our AquaFarm headquarters, selling inputs to our AquaFarmers and revenue from our AquaFarm franchisees.

Something incredibly important to the next steps in growing our business is awareness and publicity. We need capital, exposure and technical support to fully realize our vision.  The more exposure that we are able to garner, the more access we will have to the resources we need to bring this incredibly impactful solution to fruition. 

The nature of AFA’s social franchise model makes it an excellent investment opportunity for the diaspora and those looking to invest in the continent. Exposure allows us to promote the concept to the target markets we are looking to attract. One of our main ambitions is to create wealth through food sovereignty and we believe the African diaspora has a huge role to play in investing in this sector.  Our goal is to make that investment simpler and more transparent. 

Beyond capital to expand our vision, we need technical support to streamline our concept and  increase our institutional competencies. Being a part of the SOLVE community will give us access to the synergy of a network of food and ag tech pioneers who can give us insights into this industry.

There are three areas in which we are seeking partnerships:

1. Solution technology:  We have 2  technologies we are using to reach our goals; our 12 x 12 aquaponics system and our process management application.  We are constantly looking for technical mentors and partners to help us improve our system and reduce costs.  This includes aquaponics, aquaculture, hydroponics and agricultural specialists, renewable energy specialists, as our systems are run on renewable energy, and tech geeks. 

2. Funding:  We are looking for patient capital and investors looking to support transformational African development.

3. Marketing, media and exposure:  We would like to align with influencers, media companies, accelerator programs, incubators and hubs that will allow us to gain the exposure we need to promote our investment opportunity to diaspora investors as well as obtain publicity 

There are three areas in which we are seeking partnerships:

We are looking to partner with aquaponics, aquaculture, hydroponics and agricultural specialists, renewable energy specialists, as our systems are run on renewable energy, and tech companies that can advise us on the application that manages our operations.

We are looking to partner with impact investment firms and investor groups looking to support transformational African development.

We would like to align with influencers, media companies, accelerator programs, incubators and hubs that will allow us to gain the exposure we need to promote our investment opportunity to diaspora investors.  We really want to promote the idea of social franchising as a simple way to invest in the continent.

AFA’s mission is to successfully commercialize aquaponics farming throughout Africa by making the technology both scalable and accessible in a way that enhances wealth and wellbeing in local communities. To attain our mission and vision, we train African youth to own and operate a 12 x 12 meter AquaFarm franchise.  

We provide access to affordable agricultural technology to locally produce high value, niche products which are normally imported, reducing production costs and increases per meter productivity, increasing profits, repatriating monies lost to importation and thereby giving youth greater access to lucrative markets. 

Through these interventions, an AquaFarmer and their team make 10 times the average income of a local farmer. By making urban agriculture broadly accessible, we unlock the wealth opportunity in the food space for women and youth.

Imagine if refugee communities were economically empowered and food sovereign? Though not generally considered refugees, millions of young Africans leave their countries every year to move to Europe in clandestine migration.  The Sahel region and West Africa including Guinea boast the largest numbers of clandestine migrants. An investment in AFA to expand across Guinea and Senegal keeps young Africans from becoming economic refugees by giving them stable and lucrative opportunities in their homes. We envision communities that are economically empowered to enact change. With higher incomes, youth have greater voice in their communities and can actively participate in the development of their country. 

AFA's vision is to reshape Africa’s economic destiny by using Aquaponics as a tool to catalyze food sovereignty across the continent. African women hold the keys to the wealth and well-being of their communities. We envision communities where women that are economically empowered to enact change. With higher incomes, women and youth have a greater voice in their communities and can actively participate in the development of their country. 

To attain our mission and vision, we train African youth, primarily women, to own and operate an AquaFarm franchise.  Our AFA model was designed along side a group of 25 women in Guinea, Conakry through the "Women with out Borders" to create easy to use and affordable solution to urban farming. By using tech solutions to bring a finished product to niche markets in a farm to table chain, we address their concerns of food sovereignty and security, unemployment, income and environmental sustainability.

By providing women with opportunities to launch aquaponics systems through our social franchise concept, we give them access to technical knowledge, more lucrative markets, capital, low cost inputs and a logistics chain. 

Through these interventions, an AquaFarmer and their team make 10 times the average income of a local farmer. By making urban agriculture broadly accessible, we unlock the wealth opportunity in the food space for women and youth. This investment will primarily go to expanding our operations to provide franchises to the original 25 women with whom we designed AFA.