Hot startup of the month: Kenya's Farmshine

About 80% of sub-Saharan Africa's agricultural production is by smallholder farmers and the female share of the agricultural labor force in the region is the highest in the world.

Yet this female-dominated workforce has been unsupported for too long. Often having to juggle domestic duties and agricultural work – sowing and harvesting the crops while ensuring their families have food on the table – women face bigger challenges in achieving high yields than men do, an issue compounded by their relative lack of access to land, agricultural extension services, and new technologies. Failing to provide adequate support to this crucial workforce harms global food production.

According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), if women were given the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase the yields on their farms by up to 30%, which would in turn reduce global hunger by between 12% and 17%.

In Africa, where tech entrepreneurs are increasingly building out digital platforms to solve fundamental problems, there are a number of companies operating in the agriculture space, working on solutions designed to help farmers produce more and better crops and make more money, thus making a sector still known for its poverty more sustainable.

Key among them is Kenya's?Farmshine, which helps smallholder farmers aggregate quality crops for sale directly to large buyers. Formed in 2017, the startup also licenses its platform to help organizations manage the entire agriculture value chain with end-to-end traceability.

Farmshine allows farmers, buyers and service providers to trade on mutually beneficial terms, away from the meddling of middlemen. Its agriculture operating system allows smallholder farmers – 70% of whom are women in Kenya – to aggregate and sell their harvests directly to large commodity companies.

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