Kenneth Obiajulu Becomes Farmcrowdy MD, Onyeka Akumah Named Chairman as Startup Looks to Expand Production into 17 States
Co-founder of Farmgate Africa, Kenneth Obiajulu, has been appointed the new Managing Director of the Agribusiness startup, Farmcrowdy Group in a shakeup aimed at intensifying the group’s business as it looks to hit its next milestones. The appointment will take effect immediately.
Before his appointment, Kenneth Obiajulu was co-founder and MD of FarmGate Africa, a subsidiary of the Farmcrowdy Group which aggregates farm produce and gets them to the buyers. Before joining the Farmcrowdy group, he worked as HR Support at Nigerian Breweries, as Agribusiness Innovation Specialist at TechnoServe and as an Innovation Specialist at the World Bank.
For Kenneth, this is an amazing opportunity to lead a brand like Farmgate Africa and achieving a great deal of traction in such a short period time.
The plan is now to consolidate on the traction from both Farmcrowdy and Farmgate Africa to build a more robust Farmcrowdy that can create more value points across the African agriculture value chain.
Farmcrowdy MD, Kenneth Obiajulu
Farmcrowdy also named Onyeka Akumah Chairman of the startup. Onyeka expressed his enthusiasm at the appointment and stated his confidence that Kenneth would lead the team to its next milestones.
“Kenneth is going to be leading Farmcrowdy as the new Managing Director. What this means is that all the entire team at Farmcrowdy will be working with Kenneth with a mandate to grow our impact continuously with a target to work with about 50,000 farmers within the next couple of months.”
Onyeka also listed other targets for the Farmcrowdy team under Kenneth which includes: moving up the number of states Farmcrowdy operates in to about 17 or 18 by the end of the year; to continue to grow the number of beef production from around 50 bulls now to over 100 bulls a day; to increase the number of major eateries Farmcrowdy supplies beef in Lagos from 3 to 10 by June 2020.
Kenneth Obiajulu expressed his excitement at the new challenge and shared his projections into the company’s future.
“We are looking at a situation where production can easily feed into processing, processing can easily feed into a market that will be able to give the required impact to the smallholder farmers, our unique and wonderful sponsors and to us as a business.
“The mandate is very clear. We want to be able to impact the lives of 50000 farmers by 31st December 2019, we want to be able to hit at least 17 out of 36 states, and we want to show that the impact that we have on our smallholder farmers cut across everything from productivity to reduction of postharvest losses to access to finance and market access.”
Obiajulu holds a BSC in Marketing from the Redeemer’s University and an MBA from York St. John University in the UK.
