O-Farms Accelerator Program

About O-Farms Accelerator Program

O-Farms is an African SME accelerator completely focused on circular agribusiness with the goal of making circularity a mainstream approach for improved rural livelihoods and sustainability.  It is an initiative funded by the IKEA Foundation to help scale circular agribusiness innovations in East Africa.
O-Farms, led by Bopinc and Village Capital, is focused on accelerating the next generation of innovative circular agribusinesses in Ethiopia and Kenya. Agri-circularity creates a more sustainable food system that drives innovation through developing innovative business models that reduce agricultural losses thereby creating new economic opportunities and jobs in the region. In this regard, Kenya is able to sustainably feed its growing population, without depleting the natural resources. In doing so, O-Farms will build innovation support infrastructure that enables circular agribusiness to grow and develop.

In Kenya, E4Impact Accelerator will implement the O-Farm’s Accelerator Program targeted to SMEs within the agribusiness circular economy that aims to support the SMEs to refine their innovations, strengthen their business models, access financing opportunities and create a founding community advocating for better adoption of a circular economy and supportive policies & legislation.

Program Benefits

For the first cohort, up to 12 enterprises will be selected to join the program. The enterprises can expect to receive the following benefits:

• Customized training program on agri-circularity business
• Technical Assistance to embed circularity principles in the business model including strengthening the systems and processes.
• Coaching and Mentorship – personalized and group coaching to unpack training into business implementation
  Links to financial and investment opportunities
• Networking and peer learning to strengthen innovations and build a community of best practices in agri-circularity.
• Competitive peer-to-peer awarded seed grants of up to Euro 50,000 (for 2 cohort selected enterprises)
• Networking opportunities to showcase your solution and meet with investors and other stakeholders.

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA

• Be an enterprise in the agricultural sector
• Have an innovative or disruptive solution / business model that reduces food losses, or valorises the by-products generated in food production or processing, back into the food system for human food or animal feed, or into biodegradable packaging materials for the food industry, or into compost/organic fertilizers or into bio-energy.
• Be a growth stage enterprise with an existing customer base (post revenue)
• Be a Kenyan registered enterprise with at least one of the founding team members being Kenyan

Evaluation Criteria

1. Team: Your team has members who have a good understanding of the problem and/or their target customer’s problem.
2. Problem and Vision: Your team can solve the problem and articulate a vision at scale, answering the question “what does the world look like if they succeed?”
3. Value Proposition: Your team has potential customers who provide evidence that the solution solves key pain points.
4. Product: Your team has a product that is ready for the market.
5. Market: Your team understands any regulatory hurdles to enter the market and has a strategy to overcome them.
6. Business Model: Your team can point to pricing and business models of similar products in the industry as further evidence that their revenue assumptions are valid.

Any queries? Please send an email to accelerator.kenya@e4impact.org