H2O: Commercialisation for Agriculture Sector Development
Overview

Funded under RIU's Commissioned Work strand, the Commercialisation for Agriculture Sector Development project is led by H2O Venture Partners, an investment firm which specialises in early stage technology commercialisation.

The project aims to explore the potential for commercialisation of new and emerging technologies to deliver sustainable business solutions to economic and social development challenges within East Africa's agriculture sector.

The eventual goal is to develop the commercially most promising opportunities to a stage ready for incubation using H2O's investment and development model ultimately resulting in stand-alone, high-growth profitable businesses.

Following an increasingly focused screening process, these will be based on needs and opportunities associated with one or more of the following sectors:

• post-harvest crop storage
• agricultural mobile telecoms applications
• aquaculture
• quality poultry feeds

For each of these, H2O will now explore new business models and technologies with the aim of building commercially sustainable businesses that can attract the best entrepreneurial management and deliver development impact.

This work is designed to complement the more supply-driven Best Bets initiative. In contrast, the process led by H2O Venture Partners starts by identifying unmet needs in the East Africa agriculture sector and then scouts for technologies and business models that could address them.

About
Expected impact
Work programme
Partners
Contacts