As Tingo’s agriculture solutions tackle food wastage, increases farmers’ profitability

This is coming as farmers across the country disclosed how the firm’s Agric technology solution is helping them to increase their profitability and end wastage of food.

The new financial platform, an all-in-one financial solution application aimed at addressing challenges for Small and Medium Scale businesses and in extension all bank customers with smart phones, the Tingo Pay Super App will tackle the challenge of limited payment options for users.

Alao Ayoade, the Chief Operating Officer, Tingo Mobile PLC., while announcing the move said the new solution will address the challenge of inability to resolve transaction issues on time with banks, provide business continuity due to funds, provide multiple solutions to perform day to day transactions, address issues relating to complexity with adoption of application and create business continuity for Agent as the T+1 time on settlement from CBN can be challenging.

According to him, while CBN started its cashless policy in 2007, the policy has seen a lot of improvement with implementation in different sectors and various SMEs springing up and chanelling their businesses at facilitating adoption of the policy.

Ayoade noted that the Central Bank of Nigeria’s directive in 2021 to Money Deposit Banks to implement higher charges on cash transactions, saw organizations and tech savvy taking advantage by developing solutions to address the adoption and provide solutions to users of notes.

“Bank customers enjoyed a 43 per cent increase in consumer loans in two years, as banks and fintechs intensified competition for the lucrative retail lending space through digital lending services. To further enable loan companies, CBN has enabled MDB to Direct debit customer irrespective of where they have funds which will reduce the risk on loan companies,” Ayoade said.

On one hand, he said the new Tingo Pay Super App will allow end-user purchase airtime as well as data for the four major Network providers in the country (MTN, AIRTEL, GLO and 9Mobile) as well as Smile and Spectranet.

Television subscription within Nigeria for Startime and Multichoice would also be allowed on the platform as well as generation of token for users from electricity providers in Nigeria. Other services would include result checker on WAEC and one way messaging setup for One Time Password (OTP).

On the other hand, the platform will allow easy way for SME to generate online invoice for customer with various payment method.

It will also grant “Checkout”; an inline integration for Web applications and CMS to complete payment on their sites.Advertisement

It also has provision for fund transfer option within the Payant application and also transfer- API to process fund transfer from external applications while providing a dashboard for well detailed reporting system to report inflow, outflow, invoicing and monitor all traffic of users

The Tingo Pay Super App is also expected to provide agency banking, where the solution will provide POS terminals for agents to perform CashIn/CashOut transactions.

Ayoade said the new solution will also provide soft loan to customers with ease of access and repayment.

. Nigeria has arable land covering about 34 million hectares. At least 6.5 million hectares of that is for permanent crops, and 28.6 million hectares on meadows and pastures.

. The country’s agricultural products like palm oil, cocoa beans, pineapple, sorghum are leading in the world.

. Nigeria is the largest producers of sorghum in the world just after the United States, and ranks fifth in the production of palm oil and cocoa beans.

. Statistic from Nigerian Bureau of Statistic (NBS) and PwC analysis shows that contribution of the agricultural sector to Gross Domestic Product has been between 22 and 26 per cent from 2013 to 2020.

. Till date, agricultural sector is the largest employer in Nigeria. The sector employs nothing less than 36 per cent of our nation’s labour force. This is despite the fact that over 80 per cent of Nigeria’s farmers are smallholder and more importantly, the smallholder farmers (SHFs) account for for 90 per cent of our agricultural produce.

. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s agricultural trade deficit widened by N689.7 billion in 2019 compared to N549.3 billion in 2018 and from 2016–2019, Nigeria’s cumulative agricultural imports stood at N3.35 trillion, four times higher than the agricultural export of N803 billion within the same period.Advertisement

. At the same time, Nigerians spent about N22.8 trillion on food items in 2019, representing more than half of the total household expenditure of N40.2 trillion. (Stats culled from Tingo Mobile’s presentation)

Tingo Pay Super App Receives Thunderous Applause from Players in agricultural value-chain:

At the event, farmers and commodity traders under the agricultural technology platform of the company insisted that the solution provided by the company has helped in addressing critical challenges in value chain, especially wastage of food, access to market, increase in productivity among others. Tingo Pay Super App

Muryar Manoma of the Arewa Multi-purpose Association, with over 600,000 farmers across the Northern Nigeria, who engage in different category of farming such as Cotton, Maize, Rice, Wheat etc., said the development company’s initiatives provided leeway for increase in yield as well as information that help them compare situation in the country with other countries.

Habib Umar, who heads the cooperative society, noted that soft loan, fertilizer and seed provided by the company remained a game changer in their operations.

In his contribution, Salisu Sani Danmuttaga, who is the Director, Sabest MultiTrading Farmers’ Co-operative Society, said the direct membership of the group stands at about 19, 5000.

According to him, the farmers basically specialize in Poultry Farming and Greenhouse Farming/Dry Seasoning Farming, adding that adoption of Tingo’s solution like the Tingo Pay Super App simplifies their operations as time and resources is being saved.

Alwalu Shaibu, another farmer and head of Association of integrated and Agro Allied farmer Association of Nigeria, noted that the company assisted them in simplifying payment and exporting goods outside the country through off-takers without associated risks.

Disclosing that farmers under the cooperative with other associations, especially the Maize and Wheat Farmer Association as well as Fruit and Vegetable Farmers Association, which have cumulative of 60, 000 farmers, Shaibu said, timely off taking of their produce drastically reduce their loss and more than double their profits.  SHARETweetWhatsApp Telegram Email Print

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