Zowasel
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 | |
| Industry | Agritech |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2014 |
| Founders | Jerry Oche |
| Headquarters | , |
Area served | Nigeria, East Africa |
| Products | Marketplace, Alternative Finance, and Crop Pilot MRV |
| Website | Zowasel |
Zowasel is a Nigerian agri-tech and finance company. The company operates as a digital platform that links farmers and agribusinesses with domestic and international buyers.[1] The company provides tools for market access, financial services, and climate-smart reporting to support sustainable farming.[2][3]
Zowasel was founded by Jerry Oche, who serves as the CEO, and is headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria, with operations across Nigeria and East Africa. The company delivers its services through web, mobile, and low-bandwidth channels, including mobile applications, USSD, IVR, SMS, and WhatsApp in African languages such as Hausa, Yoruba, Nigerian Pidgin, and Swahili, enabling access for farmers in remote communities.[4]
Zowasel was founded in 2014 by Jerry Oche in response to longstanding challenges facing smallholder farmers in Nigeria and other African markets, including limited access to structured markets, affordable finance, and transparent pricing.
Prior to founding Zowasel, Oche launched Growsel, a crowdfunding platform for farmers.[5] The venture was unsuccessful due to structural constraints in agricultural markets, such as unreliable buyers, fragmented supply chains, weak quality assurance systems, and poor price discovery. These challenges informed the development of Zowasel as a platform connecting farmers directly with corporate buyers.[6] The company later expanded to include embedded finance, alternative credit scoring, bio-organic input support, and climate compliance tools.[7]
Products and services
Zowasel operates a digital agricultural marketplace that connects farmer cooperatives and agribusinesses with domestic and international buyers. The platform supports transactions across agricultural supply chains, including purchase order management, quality assurance, logistics coordination, trade finance facilitation, and digital payments.[6]
The company provides access to alternative finance through its Alternative Credit Evaluation Scoring System (ACESS), which assesses creditworthinessusing non-traditional data such as farm production, transaction records, and environmental indicators. The system is used in partnership with financial institutions to support access to trade and production finance for farmers and agribusinesses.[8]
Zowasel also operates Crop Pilot MRV, a digital measurement, reporting, and verification platform designed to monitor sustainability indicators, including carbon sequestration and land-use practices, and to support supply-chain transparency and environmental reporting.[4]