It’s Like Uber for Tractors, and It Could Change the Game for African Farmers
Instead of taking out a high-interest-rate loan to buy machinery, this start-up is connecting locals to farming implements via text message.
By takepart
Published on August 6, 2015
Three minutes into my conversation with Jehiel Oliver, CEO of Hello Tractor, the line goes dead. When I call back, he’s already laughing.
“Welcome to West African communication,” he said. “That’ll happen three more times during this call.” He’s right (the third time, thankfully, is the charm), but the difficulty drives home only one of the challenges he’s had to overcome in the first year of running his Uber-for-tractors start-up in Nigeria. The networks in Nigeria are so unreliable that his GPS-equipped Smart Tractors store data locally as well as in the cloud — which might not always be accessible. But that hurdle has been one of the easier ones to clear.
Read the article “It’s Like Uber for Tractors, and It Could Change the Game for African Farmers” on takepart.com.
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