Agromarketplace Nigeria Limited

Leveraging ecommerce, blockchain, supply-chain technology, and locally-grown agricultural commodities to empower African smallholder-farmers and quickly reach our customers everywhere.

Over 70 million tons of fresh farm produce and agro-commodities got wasted every year in Africa because of unstructured market in the agro-industry.
Agromarketplace Nigeria Limited (www.agromerchant.com) is a pan-African and agro-supply/export chain mobile solutions startup focused on offering crowdsourcing and crowdsharing of fresh farm produce, healthy foodstuffs and hygienic agro-commodities delivered to consumers' doorstep all over the world.
Agromarketplace Nigeria strives to disrupt the unstructured food and agro-commodities market and supply chain in Africa right from the grassroots to the marketplace by helping to make fresh, healthy and hygienic farm produce, foodstuff and agro-commodities affordable and easily-accessible to every homes and industries across the globe through crowdsourcing and crowdsharing. We are creating an investment opportunities for people to go beyond savings and invest in agro-supply and export market.
We aim to revolutionize and innovate the way agro-supply and logistics is done by providing a structured, affordable, easily-accessible and doorstep delivery services to every consumers globally.
To supply-chain and agro-export operations in Africa, Agromarketplace-(www.agromerchant.com) provides save and investment portfolio‚ leveraging blockchain technology for the unbankable (most especially farmers and low-income earners) and potential investors to invest either individually or crowdsourcing through clusters and associations with 8-10% ROI every 45 days depending if it is local or export supply they are investing on. This blockchain innovation helps us to quickly purchase and mop-up farm produce from farms through transparent crowdsourcing and reduce bottlenecks and over-head costs through third-parties. This approach helps save 70% farms produce from getting rotten on the farms.

In Agromarketplace, we do not link farmers with market, we are the #1 Africa agro-marketplace. We support smallholder farmers and rural women by planning their production and harvest based on market demands and we buy back from them. 30% of our profit are also re-invested back into farmers production with the assurance of market accessibility. Through our crowdsourcing initiative, we also pull invest from potential investors to structure the agro-market and logistics.

E-commerce provides us a wider geographic and demographic reach. Our portal provides easy and 24/7 access and one-stop shopping experience for customers to order foodstuff, fresh farm produce, livestock and agricultural commodities in a single and integrated online mall.
Our customers can order via phone calls and SMS' options, and have instantly positioned us as a reliable partner and agro-products delivery to customers. We are also leveraging our online marketplace to reach potential investors through crowdsourcing to invest in farmers produce markets. This is helping to quickly buy-back farmer produce and meet the demand and local/export market for agro commodities.

Our top 3-goals over the next year is to:
1. Empower over 5,000 rural and smallholder farmers through crowdsharing purchase
2. Acquire 5 cooling-trucks to save vegetables and fruits from spoilage
3. Establish cassava and maize buy-back from farmers market in 4 Africa regions.
We are a conglomerate of like-minds and insightful-people bound together in purpose.

Our five-year vision:
- Create a web-based, global marketplace where a variety of agricultural products and services including its extended value additions and chains can be ordered, bought and sold. This platform reaches Nigeria, with further global expansion through exportation and haulage.
- Boost the reach of local content in agroindustry; leverage our platform to expand famer's reach and distribute wealth; improve consumers' purchasing power through ecommerce and crowdsourcing.
- Boost export market and help smallholder farmers get reliable markets helping to reduce farm produce wastage by 70%.
- Boost our revenue by 500% by the end of 2021.

Agrarian women, rural youths and smallholder farmers are our first target. Over 35 million rural dwellers are unbankable in Nigeria which constitute 30% of Nigeria population. We are training and empowering them through digital agents and mobile banking. Our operation is helping them access digital agents just near them and open an account. They also report time of cultivation and harvest to us which helps us plan our market and pre-inform our buyers. Our digital solution has empowered over 7,000 farmers through our partnership with Patriots Agribusiness network and releaf Organization using our rural and peri-urban mobile-reach concept.

Our crowdinvesting service ensures individuals, groups, cooperatives, associations, cooperate and peer-to-peer investment through the purchase of minimum of one slot per unit. This investment portfolio ensures we buy in bulk from smallholder farmers, agrarian women and farmgates, supply and deliver in bulk and at wholesale price through our crowd-sharing service.
Our dual-service/business model eases the costs of produce purchase by 28%, minimizes logistics and hauling costs by 40%, and allows us to re-investing 30% profits into farms.

CEO Olalekan Bankole is a social entrepreneur and PhD student of Agricultural Extension and Communications with over 9 years' experience in agribusiness and technology integration. He is an alumnus of Tony Elumelu Foundation, FATE Foundation and shortlisted among 12 finalists of a PAN-Africa competition, Kwese inc. He integrated technology into Agribusiness to solve hunger, youth unemployment and poverty in Africa. He assembled a lean team of twelve at the onset to take Agromarketplace to embrace digital economy to change Africa narrative. Getting traction was tough initially but with digital marketing and e-payment structure, we able to empower more rural farmers.

The large demand and local/export market for fresh farm produce and agro-commodities like fruits, cashew, sesame-seeds, cocoa, soybeans, and hibiscus is highly attractive. Our export strength is high.
Survey by Euromonitor, 2014 shows local online-shopping sector grew from N49.9 to N62.4 billion between 2010 and 2011, and N62.4 to 78 billion between 2011 and 2012, representing a 25% increase in each period.
We are a conglomerate of like-minds and experts from agricultural, technology, marketing and financial sectors and insightful people bound together in purpose, faith and tenacity to wither the challenges in no long distance time. We are set to partner with reputable organizations to not only put smiles to all smallholder farmers and agrarian women across Africa, also, to immensely generate wealth for low-income earners driven through our crowdsourcing strategies.

We want to eliminate bottlenecks in the agricultural sector and make agro-commodities trade and investment on a large scale via our crowdsourcing and crowdsharing strategy. We will accelerate our solution investing in;
1. Blockchain technology which we structure agribusiness processes and provide a systematic organization for players in agribusiness and investors all over the world to help them de-risk and increase their accessibility to safe and healthy agro-market and commodity-trading participation on a large-scale in Africa.
2. Hiring additional eight-people to boost our marketing and ease our supply-chain operations as we expand to Benin and Ghana.Also, to acquire four cooling-trucks.

1. Unstructured Logistics and inappropriate delivery of the agro-commodities
2. Dealing with local, open and conventional markets and illiterate farmers
3. Time-wasting in sourcing and sorting of healthy and hygienic agro-produce
4. Spread of Fall army worm destroying maize and cereals farms in Africa. This outbreak menace is seriously affecting our supplies and doorstep deliveries of tons of maize we do yearly.