GSMA Innovation Fund for Digitisation of Agricultural Value Chains 2019 (Grants up to £220,000)

Deadline: July 31, 2019

Applications are open for the GSMA Innovation Fund for Digitisation of Agricultural Value Chains 2019. The Fund for Digitisation of Agricultural Value Chains aims to scale digital solutions for the agricultural last mile and improve smallholders’ financial inclusion, livelihood and climate resilience.

The Fund prioritises enterprise services targeted at organisations (e.g. agribusiness, cooperatives, etc.) procuring from smallholders with the focus on those living on less than USD 2 per day.

All eligible applicants at Concept Note stage, irrespective of whether they ultimately receive a grant under this Innovation Fund, will be invited to join the GSMA AgriTech Priority Learning Partners Initiative, where they will gain access to a number of knowledge sharing resources and events, including webinars on the topic of enterprise solutions for the last mile.

Categories

Grants are available across two categories of application:

• Mobile Money Driven Category
• Data Driven Category

Benefits

• Up to eight grants of £220,000 each are being made available to support projects of 24 months duration
• In addition, the GSMA will provide in-kind support and consultancy to assist the development of business plans, and service implementation through market research, user-centric design, business intelligence, user-testing with agribusiness staff and smallholders

Eligibility

Mobile Money Driven Category: Open to mobile money providers in partnership with AgriTech vendors who are developing, implementing, launching and/or scaling enterprise services (B2B2C) which digitise the agricultural last mile procurement and communication with smallholders.

The proposed development or evolution of an enterprise service must include the following primary use-cases:

• Digitising procurement records and smallholder farmer profiles (static and dynamic information);
• Digitising payments to smallholder farmers via mobile money;
• Digitising communication and providing advisory services for smallholder farmers.

Data Driven Category: Open to AgriTech organisations who have already scaled a last mile agriculture digitisation service and established a model for generating digital farmer records and explored linking farmer records with financial service providers.

The proposed evolution of these services must include the following primary use-cases:

• Digitising procurement records and smallholder farmer profiles (static and dynamic information) at a scale of at least 50,000 farmers in the proposed market;
• Using existing deployment data and digital records of smallholder farmers to provide financial inclusion services through partnerships with third-party organisations;
• Digitising communication and providing advisory services for smallholder farmers.

Application

Applications for funding  are assessed through a two-stage application process.

• Concept Note: The first step will be to submit a Concept Note, which outlines the project objectives, lists proposed partners, demonstrates the consortium’s capacity to deliver the project and explains how the project fits within wider strategy of the business owner.
• Business Plan: A short-list of applicants whose Concepts Notes meet the objectives and eligibility requirements of the Fund will be notified in  August 2019 and invited to develop a Business Plan. This will further outline the strategy for implementing and scaling the service; provide a budget projection with an indication of how the grant is to be spent, and a workplan for the 24 month implementation period. The deadline for the Business Plan submission will be 31 October 2019.

Click here to apply

For more information, see FAQs or visit GSMA Innovation Fund.