Gro-Intelligence Bridges Data and Agriculture in Africa

Gro-Intelligence is making a bet that data is the answer to slow growth in Africa’s $1 trillion agricultural sector.
According to Quartz:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that access to reliable data in Africa is a massive challenge.
Just last week, the World Bank gave $50 million to the Kenyan Bureau of Statistics to help the body with better accumulation of data. “High-quality data are critical to measure progress in growing the economy, reducing poverty and fostering shared prosperity,” Diarietou Gaye, the bank’s country director for Kenya, said in a statement.
But as the saying goes, from a problem can emerge an opportunity. Sara Menker, a former Wall Street trader originally from Ethiopia, recognized this and founded Gro Intelligence, a data analytics firm focused on agriculture.
Despite the huge potential for agriculture on the continent, the sector has not grown as fast. In the 1980s, agricultural GDP growth in sub-Saharan Africa was 2.3% per year. Between 2000-2005 that only increased to 3.8% per year, the World Bank points out. Part of the reason for this is the market information available is too fragmented to provide a coherent sense of the state of the sector. “If you went to ministries of agriculture in Kenya, Brazil and the US everybody has their own way classifying data,” Menker says.

Click here to read the full article on Quartz.