Gender in Agribusiness Investments for Africa (GAIA) identifies, spotlights and supports the growth of those agribusinesses with the potential and commitment to bridge the gender gap in African agriculture.
If Africa is to realize inclusive, agriculture-driven prosperity, there is a critical need to bridge the gap between smallholder farmers, agricultural research, agribusiness and the agribusiness investment community. GAIA is AWARD’s intentional move to connect these key players to maximize adoption, commercialize agricultural innovations and build sustainable agricultural value chains for the continent.
Agribusinesses are not only important creators of jobs, they are a sustainable way of ensuring food security. Africa’s agribusiness sector needs a steady pipeline of innovations to maintain a competitive edge. AWARD recognizes that connecting key players and closing the gender gap in agribusiness in Africa presents a great opportunity for speeding up agricultural production and economic growth. A gender-inclusive agricultural value chain will reach unserved and under-served populations and support efforts to improve agriculture, address poverty and tackle food security.
AWARD partnered with the African Development Bank (AfDB), Intellecap and African Agribusiness Incubation Network (AAIN) to launch the GAIA initiative. GAIA identifies, spotlights and supports AgTech innovators whose agribusinesses address the needs and priorities of a diversity of both men and women across the entire agricultural value chain.
GAIA focuses on technologies that address major constraints in African agriculture such as closing yield gaps in crop and livestock value chains, reducing postharvest losses and improving market inefficiencies. It also gives special focus to technologies that demonstrate clear benefits toward marginalized groups of people, including women smallholders and women involved beyond the production end of agricultural value chains. Through the GAIA initiative, AWARD has introduced a critical conversation on the importance of gender considerations within Africa’s agribusiness sector, and agricultural innovation sector more broadly.
Through its intensive boot camps, GAIA implements the AgTech Innovation Challenge and a series of other interventions to competitively selected agribusinesses. The deliberate infusion of gender throughout each training module is the salient difference of these boot camps as it enables participants to understand the value of including the diversity of men and women clientele. The GAIA boot camps offer rigorous customized training and an entrepreneur showcase, linking innovators to investors and technical experts.
Investors are in turn, trained to understand gender dimensions when making investments. In a pilot phase of GAIA in late 2016 and early 2017, AWARD brought together a total of 76 participants from 40 countries across Africa for the boot camps. Innovators were trained to navigate the investor landscape, define a value proposition for their business, pitch, understand business modeling, and conduct a gender analysis of every aspect of their business. Based on learning from the first two regional Challenges held in Nairobi and Accra, the third Challenge in Lusaka saw AWARD partner with the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO to add a module on intellectual property. Through WIPO support, several GAIA participants traveled to Casablanca, Morocco in November 2017 and took part in a regional forum addressing Innovation and Intellectual Property as Engines for Competitive Agribusiness: Empowering Women Researchers and Entrepreneurs in Africa.
More than half of the selected “agripreneurs” were in their pilot phase, with less than three years in operation since their founding.
Per Cent
Years of operation of the enterprises at GAIA Bootcamps
Catalyzing connections, empowering agripreneurs
A follow-up survey on the enterprises established that a significant majority of the participants (82 percent) reported gains in their skills and ability to prepare and present a business pitch after the boot camp. Participants reported that the GAIA boot camps presented them with valuable networking opportunities that facilitated peer learning and support. These gains have been established to have a long-lasting effect, serving as a springboard that has enabled the agripreneurs to access more opportunities to grow their businesses.
Peter Awin, co-Founder of Cowtribe Ghana participated in the 2016 GAIA AgTech Innovation Challenge boot camp in Accra, Ghana.
“The GAIA boot camp has really been useful in introducing us to the critical issues that affect gender and allowing us to apply it to our business model and help it grow, knowing that we are solving these issues from day one of our business.”(AWARD YouTube Channel).
Since his participation in GAIA, Awin won a €15,000 prize at PitchAgriHack competition held in Kigali, Rwanda organized by Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Co-operation (CTA). CTA was also one of the investors invited to the GAIA boot camp. Cowtribe is Africa’s first on-demand animal vaccine delivery service provider, using mobile phone technologies and cloud-based computing to predict when and where farmers will need vaccines for their animals and to connect them to providers for timely and reliable service delivery. More than 9,000 vaccine requests have been fulfilled.
GAIA ensures that researchers can maximize their return on investment by connecting them to entrepreneurs, investors, and agribusiness industry players ready to scale up research outputs. It also serves as an opportunity for AWARD Fellows to showcase their innovations to AgTech businesses and connect to the value chain helping to close the gap between innovators and the market.
For example, Bezawit Worku, a 2014 AWARD Fellow and the Managing Director of Agri-Link in Ethiopia, articulates that the AWARD Fellowship helped her picture what she wants to do in the medium to long term and her participation in the GAIA AgTech challenge helped her to bridge the gap and make it happen.
Agri-Link is a start-up social enterprise that works to increase farmers’ incomes by linking smallholders to the growing number of agribusinesses needing raw materials in Ethiopia. Worku highlights that she says she was empowered and inspired by meeting other entrepreneurs and this gives her a pan-African network.
GAIA also connects innovators with private-sector organizations and other institutions interested in taking up new AgTech solutions with potential for widespread adoption and/or adaptation in different contexts.
Ene Isosie Unoogwu, an agripreneur from Nigeria who participated in one of the GAIA boot camps, won the agribusiness category in the recently concluded Women in Africa Global platform held in Morocco in September 2018. Unoogwu has developed an innovation that is curbing postharvest losses, leveraging on renewable energy sources in powering our cold storages from farm to market.
She says that the GAIA boot camp built her confidence in developing, packaging and pitching business ideas, and that helped her immensely.
“The GAIA boot camp participation was the first time that what I was doing gained attention. Winning the category comes with a lot of benefits like some investments and other exposures,” says Unoogwu.