Zowasel partners with Solidaridad to improve Nigeria Oil Palm value chain

Zowasel, a Nigerian agtech startup partners with Solidaridad to ensure smallholder farmers can access the right information that will enable them to manage their farms more efficiently to enhance the quality of crops, access financial inclusiveness, and access to enhanced farm inputs to improve yields, and have access to the right markets to get more income from their harvest.

Solidaridad is an international civil society organization with more than 50 years of experience in creating a solution to make communities more resilient.

The company made a post on medium where it stated that “For many years, smallholder farmers in the oil palm value chain find it challenging to access resourceful information as well as the difficulties that arise from harvesting requirements expected by off-takers, poor crop specification, and lack of minimum crop quality knowledge.

Currently, both companies are collaborating with regard to their areas of interests, available resources, expertise, and mutual goals. They are striving to enhance the oil palm value chain of Nigeria, and the livelihoods of smallholder farmers across rural communities.

Zowasel aims to provide farmers access to financial inclusion services, enhanced farm inputs like agrochemical and fertilizers, and opportunities for small-scale farmers to associate them to the right markets through its platform.

Solidaridad will provide the access to existing knowledge by deploying trained community facilitators to local communities and provide technical support in developing oil palm small-scale farmers. For many years, Solidaridad has developed large clusters and quality databases of smallholder farmers across key farming communities in Nigeria. This will enable Zowasel to develop or improve its Crop Test Centers and Grain Booths across the communities to create a direct point of sales targeted to strengthen and connect local communities with blockchain services and technologies.

At the recent partnership, the Finance & Credit Manager at Zowasel in Nigeria, Ebenezer Oduwu, stated there are four collective positive components for their partnership to achieve:

• Train, develop, and empower local agents to support their communities
• Connect communities with access to financial inclusion services
• Provide access to readily available improved farm inputs, and
• Develop access to the market for smallholder farmers to get more sales for their produce in their communities

Also speaking, Ernest Ita, Senior Programme Officer at Solidaridad Nigeria, commented:

“A key component of the partnership is aimed at building capacities of smallholder farmers, developing and empowering local agents to transform the oil palm sector through community facilitators, provide expert advice to smallholder farmers and ensure that smallholders adopt knowledge and practices that would improve their productivity”.