Accra, Feb. 24, GNA – Four Ghanaian agricultural technology (agritech) start-ups are searching for investors to scale-up their technologies and create employment opportunities in the agriculture value chain.
The companies have successfully undergone a six-week mentorship programme facilitated by Israeli agritech experts and have developed various products expected to make farming easier and boost productivity.
The companies are: Sayetech Company Limited, Sustainable Energy Technologies Limited, AiScarecrow Technologies, and Sesi Technologies.
The products, designed and built by the firms purposely for farmers, include drone sprayers, scarecrow devices, threshers, cooking stoves, and irrigation machines.
The firms participated in the Israel-Ghana AgritechAccel project, which aimed at harnessing Israeli technology and product development expertise to benefit the agritech start-ups.
The initiative, implemented in the last quarter of 2021, was spearheaded by the Embassy of Israel in partnership with Innohub and the Pears Programme for Global Innovation.
The beneficiaries received tailored product building coaching from Israeli tech experts and Ghanaian coaches as well as training in product fit, product architecture, user experience, manufacturing and development.
At a ceremony to mark the closure of the programme in Accra on Wednesday, February 23, 2022, the beneficiaries took turns to demonstrate their products to a panel of agritech experts for review.
The experts expressed satisfaction with the tools designed by the various companies to ease the burden on farmers and boost productivity.
They urged the firms to pay attention to the changing consumer needs and continuously improve on the products so they do not become obsolete.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Theodore Ohene Botchway, Chief Technology Officer, Sayetech Company Limited, said through the project, the Company had improved the efficiency of its Multi-Crop Thresher.
“The thresher separates grains from plants for all major cereals and reduces threshing time from two weeks to two hours per acre. It also reduces post-harvest losses to less than 2 per cent,” he said.
Mr Botchway said the Company needed an investment of $2 million to scale up its operations and produce more threshers for the market.
Madam Mary Aboagye, Chief Communications Lead, Aiscarecrow said an effective rollout of its scarecrow devices could boost productivity of rice farmers and help reduce the dependency on foreign rice.
In a speech read on her behalf, Madam, Shlomit Sufa, the Israeli Ambassador to Ghana, congratulated the beneficiaries for successfully completing the programme and urged them to develop innovative products to address challenges in the agriculture sector.
She pledged the readiness of the Government of Israel to support Ghanaian start-ups particularly those in the agriculture sector to build their expertise in emerging technologies.
Mr Nelson Amo, Chief Executive Officer, Innohub, said the organisation was working to secure investment opportunities for the participants.
“We have already started talking to some investors. We have done investor introductions and some of them are in the final stages of the due diligence process,” he said.
GNA