From Failure to Factory: Rebuilding African Agriculture with Data

Описание: Most entrepreneurs start with a dream.
Desmond Kony started with a death.

In this episode of The Diary of an African Entrepreneur, Deji Adebusoye sits down with Desmond Kony, CEO and Founder of Complete Farmer, to unpack one of the most misunderstood industries in Africa: agriculture.

After the sudden death of his father, Desmond inherited a small pineapple farm in Ghana , a business he never wanted. The farm failed. Crops collapsed. Logistics broke down. Cash ran out.

But that failure sparked a revelation.

Desmond stopped seeing farming as land and started seeing it as a factory floor. He realized that most of Africa’s agricultural challenges-from policy failures to broken supply chains are data problems, not farming problems.

Today, Complete Farmer is building an end-to-end digital marketplace that connects African farmers directly to global buyers, treating agriculture with the same rigor as manufacturing and software engineering.

In this conversation, we explore:

1. Why farming fails when it ignores market demand

2. Why “farming is not a security”

3. How poor data destroys African supply chains

4. Why infrastructure and know-how are the real barriers to scale

5. How Complete Farmer pivoted from crowdfunding to a global marketplace

6. Why the future of African agriculture will be built in the cloud, not on guesswork

This episode is a masterclass in first-principles thinking, resilience, and building systems that scale across Africa.

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