Shamba Records Improves Farming With Blockchain and AI - BlockNewsAfrica

Shamba Records Improves Farming With Blockchain and AI

The Kenyan Agri-Tech startup Shamba Records has made a blockchain-based platform that uses artificial intelligence as well as big data to manage harvest records, process payments, and issue credit. 

Since their inception in 2017, Shamba Records has over 6000 farmers across Kenya and with their platform that collects data,  makes payments and technically offer to make information more efficient in farming is opening farmers up to financial services. 

Due to the discrepancies in the agricultural industry in Africa such as poor records, delayed payments, no credit alternatives, and many others, the founders of the project saw a problem worth solving and stepped up, thus Shamba Records came into play. 

With agriculture as the main source of income for many in Africa, these discrepancies were major setbacks in their income bringing work. With manual records being used and payments made by bank cheques, there was a lot of room for errors and credit facilities weren’t able to provide enough capital to sustain the livelihood of farmers. Situations like this affect over 1300 farmers across the country, a major problem not only for the farmers but the country as well. 

Shamba Records purpose was to eradicate these challenges that faced the agricultural industry and its impact can be felt across the country. By bringing on board major farming cooperatives, Shamba Records now had more than 6000 farmers using their platform and these farmers deal in coffee, tea and dairy produce.

Due to the efficiency brought on board, there had been an attraction of marketing corporations that markets coffee and tea for many farming cooperatives. Shamba Records is looking for a way to fully digitize the whole value chain to be able to have real-time data on production, farm inputs, resources, quality, and market prices. Shamba Records has landed a contract with one of the biggest counties in Kenya with over 100 cooperatives for data collection. 

Discussing their earning streams,  Shamba Records make money from subscription fees charged to cooperatives, transaction fees on payments made on their platform and interests on credit services offered to farmers. However, most of the revenue accrued is reinvested into the growth and the startup is also soliciting external investments. 

Currently, at the fundraising stage, the startup based in Kenya is looking to scale both locally and regionally. They’re also looking to make their impact on neighboring countries and even as far as Asian markets. 

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