NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

By Daphne Ewing-Chow

Three African youth-led Agritech businesses— Kenya’s DigiCow, Botswana’s Brastorne Enterprises and Nigeria’s ThriveAgric— will receive mentorship and $1.5 million in grants to help them to aggressively expand solutions to long-standing challenges faced by smallholder farmers across the continent.

As winners of the 2022 AYuTe Africa Challenge— an initiative launched by international development organization Heifer International— they will be able to scale up innovations that hold the potential to disrupt agriculture on the continent and reposition the sector as a rewarding career path for the youth.

This is according to Adesuwa Ifedi, senior vice president of Africa Programs at Heifer International, who says that the agritech accelerator sought innovations that were “poised to provide the positive disruption” that farmers urgently need.