Agriculture, Africa’s backbone, lacks timely and accurate raw data, inhibiting evidence-based planning and implementation of policy. Agricultural development continues at a slow rate because farmers cannot confidently make informed decisions, investors cannot identify and take advantage of the lucrative opportunities to channel their capital, and the government can neither predict nor measure the effects of their policies, all ultimately leading to poor decisions when allocating resources.
Due to farmers' inability to know market prices & customers' inability to directly access farmers (information asymmetry between farmers & customers in the marketplace), markets are prone to heavy exploitation & manipulation. Following the opening of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), in January 2021 together with our partners, we launched the MerchantX ™ by Bunyonyi Distributors. MerchantX ™ integrates a new blockchain-based produce aggregation & procurement management system for merchants & traders on top of the already existing Data for Agriculture (D4Ag ™) ecosystem for farmers.
The MarchantX Protocol is an agricultural produce aggregation mechanism created primarily to enable 5PL (5-Party Logistics) coordination & deliver end-to-end supply chain traceability in the areas of:
“The long term vision & goal of this project would be to tokenize these commodities & facilitate the cash settlement using blockchain based stablecoins or NFTs as this would fully decentralize the trading network/platform and increase trust between market participants.”
Bunyonyi Distributors Limited (BDL) is a Logistics & Distribution company founded in 2009 that aggregates and supplies an array of fresh/dry produce & fast moving consumer goods to & from the Greater Kigezi region from our suppliers & farmers to our clients including hotels, restaurants, wholesale buyers & bulk exporters.
“As Bunyonyi Distributors Limited, agricultural marketing is our main goal. This covers the services involved in moving an agricultural product from the farm to the consumer. Numerous interconnected activities are involved in doing this, such as planning production, growing and harvesting, grading, packing, transport, storage, agro and food processing, distribution, advertising, and sale. It also involves the acts of buying supplies, renting equipment, and paying labor.
We also intend to establish a network of low cost cold chain & silo structures for storing bulk materials. Silos are used in agriculture to store grain or fermented feed known as silage. These Silos will be used for bulk storage of grain, and other food products. We may also look at packaging some of these Products like Maize Flour, Millet flour, coffee beans, rice, potatoes, etc.
More than 80% of Uganda’s population depends on agriculture. About 7 million households in Uganda cultivated land or reared livestock in 2019 (UBOS 2022, Table 2.1). They represented 80 percent of the total households in Uganda (UBOS, 2022, p. 3). Agriculture was the main economic activity for most of the heads of those agricultural households. Goods produced in factories and/or commodities in agriculture should reach customers, the primary purpose of Bunyonyi Distributors is to get these goods from the producers to their respective customers.
Agricultural products are highly related to the food and ancillary industries. Agro-products include a broad category of products related to agriculture and a wide range of products offers a wide range of opportunities globally. Broadly we can classify into 3 classes. One is resources like feed, seed, fertilizer, pesticides, machinery, etc. Another is processed commodities of food and fiber. And the third one is fresh food items like fruits, vegetables, etc.”
- GM— Bunyonyi Distributors Limited