SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s fintech and investment arm, recently launched Tawi, a B2B agritech marketplace based in Kenya, offering secure e-commerce transactions for smallholder farmers. Tawi’s primary goal is to create a reliable and stable market for farmers, ensuring price transparency and optimizing supply chain management for improved efficiency.
“Tawi will connect our farmers to an estimated KES 200 billion (US$1.6 billion) market opportunity,” said Cherotich Rutto, founder and CEO of Tawi. “Through this platform, farmers will earn more for their produce while also improving the supply-chain efficiency of high-quality produce to commercial clients. We are doing this by aggregating demand and simplifying the process for selling and buying fresh produce at a commercial scale.”
Tawi’s mission is to enhance crop quality, facilitate scalability, and foster sustainability within the food and agriculture value chain, benefiting farmers. By directly sourcing fresh produce from farmers, the platform promotes inclusivity and diversity, aiming to partner with a minimum of 25 percent women and youth farmers.
In 2022, SC Ventures initiated the incubation of Tawi, aiming to address the pressing challenges faced by smallholder farmers, including the lack of viable marketplaces that led to post-harvest losses. Tawi is dedicated to overcoming issues such as poor quality produce, fragmented supply chains resulting from inadequate infrastructure, and the presence of numerous intermediaries. Since its platform testing phase in February, Tawi has successfully onboarded over 1,000 farmers, partnered with 250 commercial kitchens, and completed more than 1,000 deliveries.
The agritech platform initially focuses on catering to commercial kitchens, representing a significant market opportunity of approximately US$210 million (KES 28 billion) annually. Commercial kitchens can conveniently place orders for fresh produce directly on the platform, while Tawi’s efficient logistics team ensures collection from the farms and delivery within a timeframe of 12 to 18 hours. By improving delivery efficiency, commercial kitchens can extend the shelf life of the produce, minimizing food wastage in the process.
“We are delighted for the launch of Tawi, a fintech that understands agriculture is more than just a business—it’s a way of life, rooted in community, hard work, and dedication,” said Jiten Arora, Member, SC Ventures. “Like SC Ventures, Tawi believes in the power of partnerships to drive success and growth for partners and business.”
Tawi has adopted a phased approach to building its marketplace and business model. In the future, Tawi plans to embed financial services including loans and micro-insurance, and value-added services including offering agronomic support for best agricultural practices.
“At SC Ventures, we incubate new business models, new ventures with the ambition to rewire the DNA in banking to solve real-world problems. We are proud to have incubated Tawi, which will help transform and make the agriculture and food value chain more sustainable from farm to fork,” said Alex Manson, Member, SC Ventures. “Tawi is a welcomed addition to SC Ventures’ ecosystem. We look forward to exploring more ways of improving financial inclusions for farmers in Kenya and beyond.”
