The Hello Tractor application was born in Nigeria in 2014. It is now available in 14 countries, mainly on the African continent. The idea is simple: connect tractor owners with small farmers in need, describes an article in the Mail & Guardian. Presented as the Uber of tractors, Hello Tractor is inspired by the model of the global transport company: to book, all you need is a phone.
In Africa, the lack of tractors is endemic. Globally, there are approximately 200 tractors per 100 km² of agricultural land. In sub-Saharan Africa, this figure drops to 27. Through the application, a farmer can request, plan and prepay his tractor rental from one of the owners present on the platform.
App founder Jehiel Oliver, who grew up in Ohio, USA, where the economy is partly based on intensive agriculture, quickly realized there was a huge market to be had in Africa, due to the lack of “mechanization” of agriculture on the continent.
“Farmers mainly depend on manual labour”, he explains to the South African daily from Kenya, where he now resides. However, due to a lack of equipment, “they often delay their sowing”. Delays that weigh on the productivity of their plots.
In addition, many farmers cannot afford a tractor: “93% of app users live below the poverty line, and nearly 100% of them are smallholders,” assure Jehiel Oliver.
In a region where children often have to work with their farming parents, Hello Tractor also promises positive social benefits. By offering farmers a “mechanical solution”, they will have less recourse to child labour, hitherto sometimes deprived of schooling.
The app is used by “1 half a million smallholder farmers”, also found in Jamaica, Pakistan or Bangladesh.
In Africa, “60% of the continent’s working population works in the agriculture sector”, specifies the daily, and 40% of the GDP of the African continent comes from agriculture.