Agriculture / India
AgriBolo
Improving smallholder livelihoods through quality inputs, warehousing, market access, and expert advice.
Zebra CropBank
How Zebra CropBank (ZCB) creates impact:
Challenge
Nigeria is a net food importer despite 70% of its population farming. Smallholder farmers lack storage infrastructure at the farmgate, so they sell immediately after harvest, when prices are lowest and middlemen have all the power. The result is depressed incomes, high post-harvest losses, and a food supply chain that consistently fails both farmers and buyers.
Solution
ZCB places modular ‘crop bank’ storage facilities in farming communities, letting farmers store dry produce, such as rice, maize, and wheat, and wait for better prices. It aggregates demand from retailers, processors, and exporters at transparent market prices. A collaboration with Benue State has repurposed unused government facilities into ZCB-managed warehouses, expanding the network at lower capital cost.
Impact
Farmers who store with ZCB earn substantially more for their harvest, with many gaining access to formal storage for the first time. No longer forced to sell in a rush at rock-bottom prices, they have real negotiating power and keep more of what their harvest is worth.
Founder
Buffy Okeke-Ojiudu draws inspiration from his grandfather, who was Nigeria’s first post-independence Minister of Agriculture. He holds an LLB in Law from the University of Sheffield and an MA in Operations Management from Harvard, and he is an Acumen Fellow and a winner of the UN World Food Forum’s Global Startup Innovation Award.
Before founding Zebra CropBank in 2020, Buffy founded Zebra Agro-Industries and E.A.T Africa, a continent-wide food systems non-profit. Through this work, he identified last-mile storage as the key barrier keeping Nigerian farmers out of fair markets. Watch Buffy explain the business model.
elea on the board
As an active investor, we take a seat on the board – acting as a sparring partner to founders on strategy, governance, and fundraising, and keeping impact at the center of every decision. At Zebra CropBank, we are represented by:
Stefan Kappeler
Partner & COO
Nigeria’s food security challenge is structural: most consumers live in the South, while smallholder farmers produce food elsewhere. Aggregating harvests and supplying B2B customers at scale remains largely unsolved. Zebra CropBank has the model, team, and local knowledge to change that.
