Webinar: Challenges and solutions sourcing from small-scale farmers
Click here to watch the Webinar Presention video.
Are you or the businesses you support in agribusiness and facing challenges to source from the numerous small-scale farmers in your field? You are not alone! The supply chain management challenge is common for many agribusinesses in Africa, and even in the world.
USAID’s Kenya Investment Mechanism has partnered with eProd to host a one-hour webinar that you might be interested in! E-Prod has developed an affordable ICT platform, or ERP, to manage agricultural supply chains. You will get a chance to understand the innovative solutions offered by eProd, ranging from farmer registration, to production contracts, field inspections, collections, training, communication, payments, traceability, weather information, among others. Currently 75 clients use eProd to source from about 250,000 small scale farmers in 10 African countries.
The webinar is scheduled for Thursday September 10th, 2020 from 2.00pm – 3.00 pm. (Note: this event was rescheduled and initially planned on 3rd September 2020)
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Digital solutions for Supply Chain Management in the agricultural sector are more important than ever, especially now COVID-19 is making it even more difficult to source from small scale farmers. In collaboration with eProd Solutions the Africa Agribusiness Academy organizes a webinar to demonstrate practically various features of the eProd ERP platform. During a two hour webinar some of the topics covered will be: farmer and field registration (including capturing field GPS locations), field inspections, loan management (including credit scoring and automated repayment via product deliveries), produce collection, quality-based payment and produce traceability, reporting and M&E activities, communication with the farmers including automated weather forecast and production advise.
“The eProd team identified several key constraints that basically cripple field activities for the buyers from small scale producers in Africa”, according to Miss Erna Goudt, Client Relationship Manager at eProd Solutions, and speaker at the ICT4D webinar series. Due to the current crisis it has indeed become exceedingly difficult to conduct basic field operations, such as to register farmers and their fields. eProd can assist to collect farmer group, farmer and field profiles, field inspections, manage produce collections via local field staff and lead farmers. Secondly, gathering reliable data to monitor the field production via field inspections and survey data from farmers, has become very difficult and companies are in the dark regarding crop status and projecting yields. Thirdly, communicating with farmers has stopped or at least significantly reduced while the current situation requires continuation of extension services, sharing market price information, and updates on COVID-19 awareness. Fourth, following up on the buyers’ field staff’s activities is even more difficult than ever before. How to verify movements, accomplishments, etc? Finally, and probably the most criplling factor, there is lack of cash liquidity in the field for farmers to invest in field activities, farming inputs, etc. On one hand many buyers are not able to pay farners remotely via mobile money transfer or bank acocunt, and farmers can’t link up with financial institutions or can’t be checked for credit worthiness. How would buyers share credit risk information with financial institutions, automated loan repayment, tri-partite agreements, manage their input inventories without appropriate and affordable tools. Please participate in the upcoming webinar, part of the virtual edition of the ICT4D Conference and ongoing ICT4D webinar series, you will hear about low cost digital and mobile technologies to support farmers under these unprecedented circumstances.
The current health crisis is turning into an economic crisis and food adulterations are at risk. The importance of food safety is easily pushed to the background when food security becomes an issue. “With all the additional challenges during the COVID-19 the ‘invisible hand of the market’ is more important than ever and only a Market Systems Development approach can guarantee aggregating the required volumes of quality products for traders and food processors”, says 
The CTA study conducted by Dalberg Global Development Advisors refers to eProd as “an interesting example of one of the solutions of supply chain management ERPs, and specifically to manage traceability and within the African D4Ag start-up ecosystem”.
IMPULSE, the startup acceleration program developed by Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P), has announced the list of startups selected following the call for applications launched last June. The call for applications ended on the first day of October 2019 with over 350 applications received from more than 40 countries.