Karandaaz partners with GrowTech to help farmers

LAHORE: Karandaaz Pakistan has partnered with GrowTech Services to facilitate digitalised data driven scientific based agriculture practices and financial inclusion in the agricultural value chain, a statement said on Monday.

Under its ‘Pilot to Scale’ programme, Karandaaz said it had committed a grant to GrowTech Services, testing the impact of digitisation of traditional agricultural value chain, on two different crops.

The project would foretake development of an e-commerce portal, connecting farmers and bulk buyers, and integrate the GrowTech app and e-commerce platform with different payment gateways, it added.

The partnership aims to increase penetration of the app among farmers and promote usage of digital payments through the e-commerce platform.

Speaking on the occasion, CEO Karandaaz Waqas ul Hasan said, “Pakistan seriously lags behind its peers in farm productivity. We need to approach complex agricultural value chains from all possible intervention points.”

He stated that farmers, in general, were hesitant in adopting digital payments and technology due to the often-complicated procedures involved. As a result, their productivity and income had remained low, Hasan added.

Shahnawaz Mahmood, co-founder of GrowTech Services, said their focus was to enhance productivity and decrease input-costs for farmers with an objective to improve per acre yield. “We remain engaged with farmers throughout the crop cycle.

We are excited to partner with Karandaaz to make agricultural commerce more efficient with better price discovery and promote digital payments in this sector while providing trainings to farmers.”

In future, it would be useful to develop innovative credit scoring models based on new data points, he added.

The project aims to help resolve problems that exist due to traditional agriculture value chains.