START-UP TO HELP EGYPT’S FARMERS GO HIGH-TECH

PUBLISHING DATE
May 28, 2021

Egypt’s farmers could be going high-tech after a platform aimed at helping them to access finance and markets raised more than $1 million in funding.

Mozare3, an Egyptian agri-fintech platform, raised the sum in a pre-seed round of fundraising that attracted support from investors including Algebra Ventures and Disruptech Ventures.

Founded last year, Mozare3, which translates as smallholder farmer in Arabic, is described as a platform for “more than 20 million underserved, unbankable smallholder farmers and their families” in Egypt.

“Egyptian smallholder farmers have limited access to financing and no direct access to markets,” Hussein Abou Bakr, Mozare3’s founder and CEO, said in a statement.

“We believe that an agri-fintech platform focused on those farmers, like Mozare3, would revolutionise the way farmers plan, farm and sell their crops.”

The platform is designed to offer the farmers “access to innovative financial products, markets and agronomy support”.

In a country where a significant proportion of farms are small in size, Mozare3 is said to be able to bring efficiencies that would enable farmers to become contract producers.

In a statement, Tarek Assaad, managing partner at Algebra Ventures, said farming in Egypt was a sector that could “benefit the most from tech efficiencies”.

“We were impressed by the vision, capabilities and passion of the Mozare3 team, and we are excited to be part of their journey,” he said.

Egypt’s Nile Valley was a key centre for the development of agriculture from at least 7,000 years ago, when farmers created irrigation channels to harness the Nile’s floodwaters, which remain key to the growth of crops in the area today.


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