Nigerian agritech startups backed through First City Monument Bank's (FCMB) agritech programme are preparing to take homegrown agricultural technology into East African markets, as the bank seeks to help commercially viable Nigerian ventures scale beyond the domestic market.
The development was highlighted in FCMB's AgriTech Alumni Impact Report, which reviewed the progress of businesses supported through its agritech initiative. AgroCist and Crop2Cash were identified among ventures with the potential to expand into other African markets, including East Africa.
FCMB launched its agritech programme in 2018 to support technology-driven businesses addressing challenges across Nigeria's agricultural value chain. The initiative has evolved from identifying promising startups towards helping them become investment-ready businesses capable of commercial expansion.
One of the programme's early beneficiaries, Crop2Cash, developed digital tools that connect smallholder farmers to financial services and agricultural support. Its platform uses technologies including USSD, allowing farmers without smartphones or conventional banking access to participate in digital agricultural and financial services.
The company says its solutions have reached more than 500,000 farmers, demonstrating how locally developed technology can address challenges around financial inclusion and agricultural market access at scale.
FCMB's wider agritech strategy includes technologies that can help farmers respond to climate and productivity challenges. These include the use of weather and soil data, digital advisory services and climate-conscious farming approaches, alongside partnerships across the agricultural ecosystem, with support from organisations including FMO, Mastercard Foundation and UNDP.
For the startups, expansion into East Africa could provide access to new farmer populations and agricultural markets while testing whether solutions developed around Nigerian farming conditions can be adapted to other African production systems.
For FCMB, the ambition extends beyond supporting individual businesses. The bank wants to develop a pipeline of homegrown agricultural technology companies capable of attracting investment and expanding across Africa.
NBF Insight
Nigeria's agritech sector is beginning to demonstrate that agricultural technology can itself become an export. The same digital tools developed to solve Nigerian challenges around finance, market access, farm information and productivity can potentially be adapted to other African markets facing similar problems.
The bigger opportunity is therefore not simply helping Nigerian startups grow. It is building African agritech companies capable of taking locally developed solutions across borders and creating a new generation of technology-enabled agricultural businesses.
