William Pious Akakpo, Founder & CEO — CTSG Ventures / AgriFAAS Connect
Every institution that touches African agriculture eventually runs into the same wall: the farmer at the centre of the value chain is real, hardworking, and completely undocumented. No verified acreage, no yield history, no financial trail. That single gap is what keeps credit, insurance, grants and contracts from reaching the smallholders who need them most.
Services for Stakeholders & Smallholder Financing Readiness is how we describe what AgriFAAS Connect actually does once you look past "farm management software." We build the verified record that makes a smallholder — and the institutions around them — fundable, insurable and bankable. This is one of our core service lines, and it's open to the partners who want to build on it with us.
1. What AgriFAAS Connect is
AgriFAAS Connect is an offline-first farm management platform — web and mobile, 25 integrated modules — that gives each smallholder a verified digital identity: GPS-mapped fields, input logs, financials, harvests and sales, with extension officers capturing data inside the same workflow. It's one role-based platform, not a patchwork of separate apps, with dashboards, AI-based performance scoring, bookkeeping, reporting, profitability analysis, diagnostics and audit-ready preparation. Guided, step-by-step workflows and offline synchronisation make it usable by farmers at any level of technical skill, and by fieldworkers in areas with little or no connectivity.
Behind the platform sits a physical proof point: our solar-irrigated production, training and aggregation hub in Tsiame, Ghana's Volta Region — 20 acres under construction as the first instalment of a 100-acre replication template. The hub is where the platform's records get made in practice: water, inputs, extension, training and off-take in one place, feeding straight into each farmer's digital file.
Verified traction: 41 agribusiness workspaces and 92 active users, growing steadily; 111 extension officers trained through our internal pilot and webinar series. Revenue streams: subscriptions, training, and farm produce.
2. Services by stakeholder
The same underlying data layer serves different institutions differently. Here is what AgriFAAS Connect provides, by stakeholder type:
| Stakeholder | What AgriFAAS provides |
|---|---|
| Smallholder farmers | Verified farm records that build credit and insurance readiness; guided workflows; offline capture; farming, livestock and trade records in one place. |
| FPOs & cooperatives | Member management, aggregated and auditable records for grant compliance, group production planning and collective selling. |
| Banks & SACCOs | Lending record-keeping, repayment visibility, and farm-level data that strengthens credit assessment for agricultural portfolios. |
| Insurers | Support for weather-index / parametric products: trigger calibration from verified farm data and claims verification without costly field visits. |
| Donors & development partners | Farmer-level traceability for programme M&E, deployment verification and value-for-money reporting. |
| Government programmes | Digital farm records for programme management, subsidy targeting and extension-service coordination. |
| Universities & innovation hubs | Agribusiness training, extension-service delivery, research partnerships and student/intern engagement on live farm data. |
| Off-takers & aggregators | Quality and quantity visibility from plot to delivery, supporting contract farming and harvest commitments. |
If your institution isn't neatly on this list, that's fine — the data layer is general-purpose. Tell us your use case and we'll tell you honestly whether it fits.
3. How we make smallholders eligible for funding, loans and insurance
Financing readiness isn't a single feature. It's four things working together:
| Pillar | What it does |
|---|---|
| Verified farm identity | GPS-mapped acreage, crop history, inputs and yields — the documented existence most smallholders lack the moment a funder, bank or insurer asks for it. |
| Digitised financial records | Bookkeeping, harvest and sales records, profitability analysis and audit-ready reporting — turning an informal operation into an assessable risk a lender can actually price. |
| Aggregation | Hubs and extension networks group farmers into portfolios large enough to be worth a lender's or insurer's attention, with a physical aggregation and repayment point behind the data. |
| Investor visibility | Our sister platform, NOVAC (curetechnologies.org), is CTSG's investor-facing gateway — transparent, real-time dashboards that track investor funds deployed through farming operations, connecting impact capital directly to verified farm-level activity. |
Put simply: if you can measure a farm, you can insure it, lend to it, and pay for it. That measurement is what we build — record by record, season by season — so every institution downstream of the farmer has something real to work with.
4. What we're seeking — an open invitation to collaborate
We built this service line because institutions kept asking us the same question in different words: how do we reach and finance smallholders we can't currently see? We'd rather answer that question together than in isolation, wherever you're working. Concretely, we're seeking:
| Partner type | What we're seeking |
|---|---|
| Local partners & legal counsel | Help us assess the right structure for operating in a new market — direct registration, a subsidiary, or a local partnership — and walk us through the practical registration requirements. |
| Market scoping partners | Introductions to agricultural innovation hubs, university departments, cooperatives and FPOs who need verifiable farm records, member management and financing readiness in their region. |
| Financing & insurance institutions | Banks, SACCOs, microfinance institutions, insurers and donor-funded programmes who want a data layer under an existing or planned agricultural finance product. |
| Research & development collaborators | Universities and innovation hubs that want to study, pilot or extend AgriFAAS Connect's model on live farm data. |
We are not wedded to one geography or one type of partner. Ghana is home; Tsiame is proof; but the model is designed to travel, and we'd rather build the next chapter with the people who already understand their own market than parachute in without local grounding. If any of the above sounds like you — bank, cooperative, university, donor programme, insurer, or simply someone who knows a smallholder network that needs this — reach out. Tell us your context, and we'll tell you plainly how (or whether) AgriFAAS Connect fits.