Hello friends,
Welcome to the Ghana Innovation Journal newsletter. Blitz what happened in Ghana’s innovation landscape over the last week.
- Complete Farmer hits $300,000 crowdfunding target to provide inputs finance for farmers.
- Sommalife secures grant funding from GSMA Climate Resilience Innovation Fund.
- Government to set up a Fintech Innovation Fund to spur innovation.
- Viamo bags $50,000 as one of the winners of AI for Climate Resilience in Rural Areas Innovation Challenge.
- Tullow partners Innohub to support early and growth-stage agriventures .
- Ghana and Swiss governments authorise a new greenhouse mitigation activity.
- Farmerline expands to Togo and Benin with the launch of its farmer helplines.
- iKolilu’s CEO selected as Transcend Network Edtech fellow.
- MedTrack and Medpharma picked for the HealthTech Hub Africa Accelerator.
Funding
- As part of its goal to spur the Fintech industry, the government intends to set up a Fintech Innovation Fund. This was made known by Dr. Addison, the Governor of the Central Bank. The initiative is an excellent idea, as funding startups will improve the fortunes of some companies. With the bad public financing scheme record in this country, we await to see the execution of the fund. We hope the funds do not land in the accounts of Directors as it happened at the Venture Capital Trust Fund in 2015.
- Sommalife, the shea-focused agtech platform, has been selected as one of the eleven recipients from the GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation. The company intends to use the funds to enhance its software to digitise 90,000 female shea nut farmers. The farmers will be supported to raise 50,000 seedlings and protect 1,500 acres of shea parklands in their communities. In the long term, these conservation activities will contribute to carbon sequestration and enable trained farmers to participate in the carbon markets.
- Viamo, the platform that connects the disconnected, has secured $50,000 as one of the winners of the Moonshots for Development’s AI for Climate Resilience in Rural Areas Innovation Challenge. The company is building an AI-powered voice companion to bridge the digital divide for agriculture extension agents and farmers. It enables real-time interactions in local languages, providing instant, tailored information on climate-sustainable agriculture.
- Complete Farmer hits $300,000 crowdfunding target to provide input finance to farmers. The debt financing provided by over 7,000 lenders on the Kiva platform will enable Complete Farmer to support 400 farmers served by Complete Farmers’ fulfilment centres, mostly in the underdeveloped northern region of Ghana.
Partnership
- Tullow Oil has partnered with Innohub, the business accelerator, to support early and growth-stage agri-ventures. The Tullow AgriVentures Programme will provide business development training and support, technical training, and smart funding to Small and Growing Businesses in the agribusiness value chain to generate 600 new agriculturally linked ventures and support 30 existing businesses to grow and create more than 1,500 jobs.
- The Ghanaian and Swiss governments have authorised a new mitigation activity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The partnership co-developed by ACT Group and Envirofit will sell 180,000 Envirofit improved cookstoves to smallholder farmers in rural and peri-urban parts of Ghana at a below-cost price subsidised by carbon finance. This will reduce household biomass consumption by 60%, significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Product Launch and Expansion
- Farmerline expands to Togo and Benin with the launch of its farmer helplines. The helpline will provide farmers access to agronomic content in their local languages and enable them to benefit from high-quality inputs like fertilizers and seeds.
Accelerator
- iKolilu’s CEO, Timothy Owusu, was selected as a Transcend Network Edtech Fellow. iKolilu is a cloud software application that automates school information systems to eliminate redundant processes and manual, error-prone interactions. The Transcend Network fellowships support early-stage founders building education and future of work solutions. Founders are supported to run weekly experiments, receive fundraising support and build a global founder-investor network to find product-market fit.
- MedTrack and Medpharma were picked for the HealthTech Hub Africa Accelerator. MedTrack was selected for the Growth Track where startups are supported to refine their business models, validate their solutions, and integrate them into the public health sector. Medpharma also joins the Scaleup Track, which aims to support scale-ups in validating and integrating their solutions at scale into one or more public health systems in Africa.
