Building a Sustainable Foundation for Agriculture in Africa

The ag-tech sector in Africa has faced a common challenge: promising startups fail to deliver lasting impact. This isn’t necessarily due to flawed products, but rather structural issues that prevent them from reaching their full potential.

Bernard Wright, lead at AgriOS—an open-source ERP for African agri-SMEs developed by Dutch-Kenyan firm Advance Insight —explains that many companies start from scratch, building the infrastructure before they can even ship their solutions. This creates a ‘single point of failure’ where the entire ecosystem collapses when funding dries up or leadership changes.

The iProcure story illustrates this perfectly: despite digitizing over 1 million farmers across Kenya and Uganda with a working platform, the company required an 18-month salvage operation after entering administration in 2024. The technology itself was valuable, but its centralized architecture lacked resilience.

A New Approach Through Open Source

AgriOS offers a third way—building a shared foundation as a public good while allowing local actors to customize solutions for specific markets. This model mirrors how the Linux Foundation governs major open-source projects like Android and Kubernetes, ensuring broad adoption and preventing vendor lock-in.

The approach has several key benefits:

  • Resilience: Distributing infrastructure across multiple players eliminates single points of failure
  • Local ownership: Agri-SMEs retain control over their data and investments
  • Faster innovation: Local firms can build on a proven platform rather than starting from zero
  • Sustainability: The open-source model ensures long-term access even if one company fails

Proof of Concept with Akeyo Africa

Akeyo Africa, a Ugandan agri-tech startup, has already demonstrated this approach in action. By building on the AgriOS foundation, they created Auxo Connect—an agricultural intelligence platform that secured over 100 paying B2B customers at launch.

“We got to market faster and cheaper thanks to AgriOS,” said Miriam Apell, CEO of Akeyo Uganda. “Digitisation is only the first step; we needed a flexible foundation to build on.”

The success of Akeyo shows how open-source infrastructure can unlock local innovation while creating sustainable jobs and economic value within African communities.