About Tafadzwa
Tafadzwa is a 22-year-old entrepreneur and a farmer from Zimbabwe. He is passionate about agriculture and the potential of technology in stabilizing farmers’ financial status.
Transition into Entrepreneurship
Because Tafadzwa is a farmer and comes from an agricultural family, his passion for agriculture has been growing since he was a kid. He mostly spends his time visiting his father’s farm and surrounding areas to get more depth and understanding of the challenges that farmers face. At the age of 19, he started a small company called Musika which linked farmers to buyers through WhatsApp. Through this start-up, he learnt that farmers had more deep-rooted problems that relates to their financial stability and their insurance so he pivoted to his current start-up, eAgro.
Business Profile
Tafadzwa launched Murimi Electronic Agriculture (eAgro) in March 2020. eAgro fosters resilience and profitability of smallholder farmers by using data analytics and machine learning. Farmers in emerging markets face challenges from low productivity and growth traps mainly due to the risks they face from ongoing climate change, pests, economic turmoil etc. This leads to farmers to dwell in poverty and their inability to grow their farms. Additionally, farmers struggle to find financial stability as they cannot afford traditional insurance premiums. Where several banks offer credit to farmers theoretically, yet only 1% of bank lending goes to agriculture in Africa which means practically farmers cannot access the credit. Therefore, eAgro aims at creating low-cost insurance premiums and alternative credit scores tailored for unbanked and underserved farmers.
eAgro’s dream is to be able to scale into other countries within the SADC region and be able to put their services and products in the hands of every farmer. We plan to grow and scale by partnering with governmental bodies and NGOs working directly with farmers to be able to scale our product.
