Unlike informal agents and government or donor-funded extension workers, agent networks are clusters of third-party and often semi-independent micro-entrepreneurs that are organised around the last or middle-mile delivery of a product or service. Using “agents” to deliver basic agricultural support to farmers is not a new invention. But these agricultural agents were mostly paid government officers or contract-based employees working as part of time-limited and donor-funded interventions. Another set of historical agents in Africa have been the loosely organised group of middle-men. These typically informal agents sit along the value-chain and aggregate produce in remote villages, supply input, and facilitate…
Author: Abraham Augustine
Sure, exuberant VCs have written cheques to people who should not have been allowed to hold their neighbour’s wallet for even one second, and surely, people may have been incentivised to try to make a quick buck and pay themselves a fat salary. And of course, African tech (not African VC) as it is today, may not be economically transformative in the short term (I say this with great caution). But the point is that venture capital may not have successfully lifted Africa’s paltry GDP tenfold, but is a potent ingredient in the business investment mix. In some cases, one…