Success Story of Olamide, 2015 TEF Alumni in Agriculture Sector
Success Story of Olumide Ogunbanjo, 2015 TEF Alumni from Nigeria in the Agriculture Sector:
Recent estimates show that about 88% of all flowering plants and 35% of the global plant-based food supply rely on pollinators to be successful. Pollination is a vital ecological service provided by a wide range of insect species including bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, beetles, and moths.
With a strong belief in transforming the rural landscape into business empires, Olumide Ogunbanjo offers farmers free beehives on their farms to help improve the yield of grown fruits and vegetables by using the honeybees as pollinators.
“I grew up as a farm boy in the ancient town of Iseyin, Oyo State, my parent were peasant farmers, and they could hardly take care of me and my siblings. I had dreams of studying agriculture and returning to the farmlands to create wealth for the farming populace. I have a strong belief that I could be the agent of change in transforming the rural landscape into business empire.”
From the initial seed fund, he got through the TEF entrepreneurship program, he expanded a single bee farm into a group of “outsourced bee farms.”, created a new business model, “Pollination as a Service (PaaS), invented and patented a Smart Beehive and rebranded as AgroData.
He currently provides direct full-time employment to 11 and part-time jobs to 27 with operates across Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Abuja, Dakar, and Senegal, and has a generated a total revenue of $46,700 till date.
“TEF was the initial seed fund we got in the very 1st edition in 2015. We were basically beekeepers at that time, producing FRESHDEW BEE HONEY. The $5000 enabled us to expand a single bee farm into a group of “outsourced bee farms”. The expansion gave us a clue about the communal effects of having bees on the farms. We created a new biz model ” Pollination as a Service (PaaS), invented and patented a Smart Beehive and rebranded as AgroData.”
From the support through the TEF program, his company has been nominated for several awards and fellowships programs and positively impacted the lives of over 21,000 rural dwellers.
About The Tony Elumelu Foundation
The Tony Elumelu Foundation is the leading philanthropy empowering a new generation of African entrepreneurs, driving poverty eradication, catalysing job creation across all 54 African countries, and ensuring inclusive economic empowerment. Since the launch of the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme in 2015, the Foundation has trained over 1.5 million young Africans on its digital hub, TEFConnect, and disbursed nearly USD$100 million in direct funding to 18,000 African women and men, who have collectively created over 400,000 direct and indirect jobs. The Foundation’s mission is rooted in Africapitalism, which positions the private sector, and most importantly entrepreneurs, as the catalyst for the social and economic development of the African continent.