About AgBase
Data and intelligence for agricultural innovation and investment in underserved markets
AgBase is a global initiative aimed at building the knowledge and information infrastructure needed to increase funding into digital and technology-driven solutions that can improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and across underserved markets, from Lima to Dhaka. At its core, Agbase is a data and intelligence platform focused on agtech, foodtech, and related sectors such as climate and finance. It provides the latest data, research, and market insight for investors, governments, innovators, and enablers operating in this industries.
The problem
In Africa, there are an estimated 33 million smallholder farms contributing up to 70 per cent of the continent’s food supply but their outputs are increasingly under pressure from a changing climate, insecurity of agriculture inputs, weak supply chains, and lack of access to markets and solutions that can improve their livelihoods.
Funders, governments, corporates, innovators, and ecosystem actors are increasingly investing in, building, and enabling technological solutions that are addressing these challenges for smallholder farmers, but they lack accurate, relevant and quality data and intelligence on what innovations can have the biggest and most sustainable impact.
Unlike other markets across the global south and global north, there is no data and intelligence platform dedicated to agtech and foodtech in Africa and underserved markets. This undermines potential investment into these ecosystem in Africa at a time when it is most needed to promote deal flow.
Agbase
Briter Bridges and Mercy Corps have partnered to launch AgBase, a multi-year programme, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), to address this data and intelligence gap in an effort to increase investment and innovation in digital solutions that can improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Africa and across the Global South.
Agbase has 4 core activities:
Data: The AgBase ecosystem-building initiative will be centered around a core data and intelligence platform providing up-to-date information on Agtech and Foodtech as well as related Climate Tech and Fintech innovations, active funders, deal-flow data, impact metrics and market-level data to provide ecosystem actors with a new and improved understanding of these investment opportunities and their impact potential. This data will be tracked across the Global South to offer investors, innovators and enablers cross-regional comparability to surface opportunities for learning and collaboration.
Intelligence: Innovation maps, cross-regional comparisons, case studies, impact innovator profiles, industry reports, amongst other content will be generated to inform discussions around market barriers, gaps and opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa and across the global south.
Impact: AgBase will work with ecosystem stakeholders to advance a standardised impact metric system to track solution-level impact potential that can be adopted by innovators and funders, as well as house impact related-data and impact innovator profiles on the data and intelligence platform.
Engagement: Agbase will engage actively with the ecosystem to understand the emerging data and intelligence needs and how to best to collaborate to respond to them. This includes hosting targeted events such as regional networking events and side events at the 100+ global and regional food and agriculture-related events each year, establishing advisory groups and forming data partnerships that strengthens the ecosystem at large.
Learn more about AgBase
If you are interested in learning more about the Agbase programme and getting the earliest possible access to the data and intelligence platform please sign up to our mailing list!