In many African countries, farming is still largely done in the traditional ways. Also, funding remains a challenge, leaving farmers with little or no capital to do commercial farming. To combat this challenge, a Gambian entrepreneur has created The Gambia’s first agric-tech crowd funding platform. Its goal is to link farmers to investors.
Modou Nsz Njie created Money Farm in 2018 and it works by matching farmers with investors who would invest in their ventures to help them scale their business. Modou himself is an IT specialist in database management with a combined experience of 20 years. He has served as IT manager for two banks in The Gambia and he created Money Farm due to what he witnessed with too much red tape and funding challenges in the agric sector in The Gambia and other African states.
“Due to these frustrations which often mean most farmers cannot gain access to loans I came up with the idea of setting a crowd funding platform to address this issue,” he said. “This was how Money Farm Gambia was born.”
He built Money Farm himself with zero seed funding and as of 2019 raised US$20,000 from six investors and farmers who have been on board since September 2018 when the start-up officially started operations.
“At the moment there is a lot of foreign dominance in our markets over 80% of our food and goods are imported. Gambian startups should be given the opportunity to compete in terms of supplying needed goods and services which are often given to non-Gambians. The importation of fresh produce can also be controlled so that local produce can thrive,” he told face2faceafrica.com.
The future of The Gambia and Africa looks promising as more and more people in Africa have embraced entrepreneurship and innovation, he said. “Gambia can potentially become a good model for Africa if the right mindset is in place amongst entrepreneurs and the government.”
