Savannah Agro-Allied Concepts [SAACs]

Leveraging Africa's endowments of abundant agricultural heritage and workforce on technology to solve its challenges of food inadequacy and social insecurity.

Africa is a continent beset with various interlinked problems. From population explosion to civil and communal strives to mass perilous emigrations to unemployment and to food insecurity. A noticeable denominator to all these problems is seen in paucity of gainful economic engagement. But for a continent that cherishes witty sayings, the African situation could be likened to that of a chicken starving to death while sitted high up on a knitted sack of whole grains. Africa has most of the paraphernalia not only enough to solve its own problem but exportable to solve that of other continents as well.

The solution lies in a few words: technology, agriculture, manpower, industrialization, exportation and social corporate commitment. A judicious interplay of all these factors is what we summed up in a renaissance ideology dubbed the SAACs or the Savannah Agro-Allied Concepts.

The mechanism of function of the SAACs modality is very simple: leveraging our abundant agriculture and human resources on technology to drive an industrialization that will support veritable exports, grow a middle class and shrink a starving lower class.

Technology is vital and conspicuously present in all the sectors of SAACs operations. From the use of AgIoT to support our peasants and small scale farmers (producers of most of our foods and exportables) to AI and engineering tech to drive our industrialization to ICT for networking and relational e-commerce activities to place on high up in the global supply market.

Agriculture is the commonest and the most widely available profession to Africans. Unfortunately, the main drivers of this sector in Africa are the uneducated and under resourced peasants and small scale farmers resulting in very poor yield values. SAACs purpose is to support these groups with technology, education, extension services and better farm practice resources to enable them produce adequate food and industrial feed stock for the SAACs industries.

Industrialization: SAACs intend to process and add value to such farm produce converting them into nourishing end-food products and allied products leveraging on engineering, green energy and production technology for better product qualities and higher market values exportable products.

Commerce: This is both conventional and e-commerce. And it entails reaching out to mainly the growing African middle-class and diaspora population and the rest of the global demands for our products for greater revenue and profits.

Social Corporate Responsibilities: Now this is probably the most unique characteristic of the SAACs model. Emphasis here is to redistribute the huge gains of value addition accrued through the whole chain equitably among all stakeholders with more focus on the hitherto neglected BoP farmers. Residual Income on Harvest (RICH) is a SAACs program designed to enable SHF make 3-4 time the income they make conventionally at similar or lower energy inputs. 

These SAACs changes shall help solve the issues of:

·         Food insecurity

·         Unemployment

·         Social insecurity or communal and civic disturbances

·         Land Grab Issues

·         Perilous Emigrations

.         Child labor

·         Poverty

·         Dwindling industrial feed stocks

·         Lack or poor employee welfare

·        

SAACs can be perceived as a new innovation on the wheels of existing modern age technologies. Agritech and its components of precision farming, biotech, Ag-IoT, Ag-AI, farm management softwares, distribution and e-commerce technologies shall further add value to our food chain process. Technology in the form of m-commerce and product and income tracking systems is well represented in SAACs wealth multiplying and re-distributing Residual Income on Harvest [RICH] program for small holder farmers. 

Technology is the foundation of our business model and the concepts of Agritech IoT and AI are critical to the success of SAACs.

With Agritech, we shall empower our SHF to triple there production efficiency through the use of precision farming, biotech (pesticides and fertilizers),

Through IoT, interconnected probes, sensors and machinery shall receive and relay vital information on weather, soil pH, temperature, humidity to analytic centers. IoT

Engineering technology shall support with better industrialization while transportation technology facilitates with distribution

ICT and other commerce technologies shall create marketplaces and improve social media interconnectivities.

While Ag-Blockchain is in our offing

Establish food processing SMEs to facilitate with processing of farm produce to finished exportable products.

Establish an extensive and formidable transportation network for processed (fulfilled) farm produce to veritable off-takers and customers.

Interconnect SHF and very small scale food industrialists with high volume off-takers via SAACs fulfilment (value-adding industrialization) centers.

Establishment of export channels and formidable distribution routes for our fulfilled and finished food products

Introduction of innovative good farming technologies to farmers and small scale industrialists to increase their input/output efficiency.

These are vertical integration, horizontal integration, consolidation on existing tools, innovations and the Africanization of the SAACs system.

Vertical Integration: Starting off with food production SMEs in Nigeria, there’ll be backward integration into plantation farming and more support for SHF/peasants with technologies and resources needed to boost feedstock production; while forward integration shall be on the development of full-fledged self-sustaining distribution and commercialization platforms.

Horizontal integration: development and growth of SAACs non-food agro-allied associates.

Tech Innovations towards increasing yield on shrinking natural resources and more efficient industrialization projects.

And Africanization: transcribing SAACs success in other African countries.

The central platform for the demonstration of SAACs ideology are our web of AgSMEs. A typical AgSME exhibits 4 types of beneficiaries:

1. The SHF/Peasants and micro/small holder industrialists

2. Factory labor force

3. Off-takers and dealerships

4. Customers

Access and retainer-ships are through: conventional & social media advertisements, products education, great logistics, quality customer service, continuous innovation; better remuneration (labor force); low cost price and high value of product (off takers).

Food products shall provide for nourishment and revenue while their allied-products derivatives shall generate profit. The RICH program shall provide residual income to farmers long after primary harvest.

Small Holder Cassava Farmers: Six farmers are presently educated and supported by our SASCO, AGREES & Savannah Logistics teams.

Micro Garri-industrialist: These are mainly local women producing garri using simple tools and crude methods. AGREES team educates them on market focused manufacturing skills. There are 12 of such women benefitting from such skills.

Garri Off-takers: They get served with best quality and consumer demand garri. Three (3) local and one (1) US based off-takers are in currently the books.

Garri End Consumers: These group now have the rare chance of being served hyper-nourishing garri at most affordable price.

Over 12 months, we hope to engage between 50 -100 farmers on our maiden SME - Savannah Foods (processing and supplying 3 products: garri, ginger and cocoa). Service at this level shall be limited to good farming practice & supply of biotech resources (fertilizers & pesticides) through our AGREES [Agricultural Education & Extension Services of Savannah] team of experts to the farmers and transportation of goods to our factories through Savannah logistics.

Within 3 years (post-breakeven point), more farmers and 30-50 micro-industrialists shall benefit from more IoT and Agtech programs as well as the Savannah residual income on harvest or RICH program.   

Founder:

Management: Whole Health Innovation Project Manager at VAMC Bedford, MA USA

Food and Nutrition: Physician with profound knowledge in food and nutrition. Also has in view an MSc in Food and Nutrition

Healthy Living & Fitness: Complimentary Integrative Health approach champion

Clinical Research: GI studies  

Entrepreneurship: CEO and founder of Capital Merchants, Philadelphia, PA

Co-Founder:

Agricultural Economics: Professor of Agricultural Economics, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria

Agricultural Research focus:

1. Gender issues in agriculture

2. Agricultural production economics

3. Policy issues in agriculture and

4. Farm management economics

Entrepreneurship & Management: CEO Nimeer Investments Ltd, Nigeria – An EXIM SME (startup)

The SAACs revenue model is a technology powered system of self-sustaining SMEs with their support platforms all locked in a virtuous cycle of increasing economic growth and profitability.

We create, consolidate and integrate AgSMEs with their technological supporting platforms. Downstream is into farming, mainly supporting small holder farmers to generate the feed stock required for our industries while upward integration is into commerce creating and liaising with global and local marketplaces to get our value added products out.

Sustainability, profitability, scale and expansion are very realistic because:

We operate off abundant cheap resources and energy - Africa

We do not just produce food or merely serve as a farmer-consumers conduit, but add value, quality and class to the farm produce in fulfilled foods and agro-allied products prior to passing them to our consumers

We integrate our services such as to maximize profit and professional efficiency

We are innovations poised, customer centric, low costing and technology driven, thus keeping us miles ahead of our closest competition

We are a social corporate organization hence our base can never be eroded by the competition

And what more, African and world population is exploding, and with it, the need for more food!

MIT is a globally renowned center for advanced technological education. With MIT-Solve connecting innovators with resources for improving humanity, we believe MIT through Solve has exactly what we need – technology education, collaboration, partnerships and tools, and a close-knit support for fundraising our humanity serving platform.

Our tech interests are: Ag-IoT, ICT, AI and in due course Ag-Blockchain technologies. And under Partnerships and Funding we look forward to connecting with Solve’s associated Angel investors, corporate partners, social corporate investors, equity investors and accelerators.

Lack of funds: With a very robust scalability potential, the SAACs business model has been designed to generate revenue abinitio. But this beautiful dream might end up a mirage due to lack of funding.

Solve to facilitate with financiers, investors and partners. SAACs would need up to $2.5millon in its first round of funding. But because SAACs model is designed a self-sustaining entity, even with as low as $100,000 we shall raise more than $2.5 million within our first 2 years of post-funding operations.

Technology: Agtech is the platform flying the whole concept.

Also, Solve to provide with tech input