Kenyan agricultural services provider Cropnuts launches operations in Nigeria
NIGERIA – Kenya’s Crop Nutrition Laboratory Services (CROPNUTS), leading provider of agricultural services in East Africa has formed a joint venture in Nigeria, partnering with the technology delivery arm of International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) known as BIP.
The new organization, Cropnuts AgriServe is aimed to provide an exciting range of quality agricultural laboratory and agronomic advisory services to agribusiness and farmers across Nigeria.
“Our services continue to help farmers build nutritionally balanced, healthy soils to sustain high-yielding crops that are pest and disease-resistant.”
Jeremy Cordingley – CEO Cropnuts
Further to that, it will enable Cropnuts to expand its foot-prints into the West Africa market an addition to its presence in East and Southern Africa.
“Over the past 20 years, Cropnuts has become a leading fully independent ISO172025 agricultural laboratory and agronomic advisory service provider, now with a footprint in East, West and Southern Africa.
“Our services continue to help farmers build nutritionally balanced, healthy soils to sustain high-yielding crops that are pest and disease-resistant,” said Jeremy Cordingley CEO Cropnuts.
Cropnuts was established in 1998 and started out as a small analytical laboratory in Kenya.
It has grown to provide world class laboratory services, precision agriculture, soil fertility and fertilizer use advisory services.
“Our new AI driven soil testing technology platform will now enable all the players in Nigerian value chains to offer low-cost soil testing to their smallholder farmers, increasing crop offtake and de-risking financial lending,” added Jeremy.
On the other hand, IITA Business Incubation Platform (BIP) was created to provide a platform to link research, development, commercialization, and capacity development through the establishment of full-scale production facilities, the creation of supply chain models and raw materials processing for various crops, intended for adoption, and replication by the private sector.
Meanwhile, The Mastercard Foundation has partnered with Nourishing Africa and U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF) to train 2,0000 young agripreneurs and provide small grants to 125 MSMEs in Nigeria.
The Entrepreneur Support Program (ESP) is designed to support grassroots MSMEs across the Nigerian agriculture and food landscapes to rebuild and strengthen their businesses.
Leveraging ICT, data and innovation, Nourishing Africa has developed a four-step program to directly back these MSMEs with training, financing, and support to ensure the scaling of resilient businesses that can withstand future shocks.
Grassroots and small businesses in Nigeria continue to struggle for survival due to a range of challenges which the Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated.
The MSMEs’ lack of visibility often impairs their access to market, training, capacity building, and funding opportunities.
To truly realize the potential of the food and agriculture sector in Nigeria, which is driven by these underserved MSMEs, Nourishing Africa, the Mastercard Foundation, and USADF have joined forces to train and provide technical support and catalytic financing to the entrepreneurs.
Through ESP’s various components, including a business resilience diagnostic tool and an agribusiness entrepreneur development seminar, Nourishing Africa will provide ongoing support to all participants and small grants of up to N3.5m (US$9,198) to 125 of the 2,000 participants.
The Program will also refer suitable participants that did not receive grants to partner financial institutions to help them access additional resources to scale their operations.
