Anaporka Adazabra

There is a particular kind of problem that Anaporka Adazabra has built her company around: the gap between what a smallholder farmer produces and what they are able to capture from it. Not just in income, though that too, but in visibility, in negotiating power, in the simple ability to participate in a market on anything close to equal terms. Farmio’s answer to that problem is neither purely technological nor purely social. It is both at once, and that combination is what makes it interesting.

Anaporka came to the 2024 WAYA competition as 1st Runner Up in the Female Ag-Tech Innovator category. Within a year, Farmio had grown in ways that validated both the recognition and the model behind it.

The money went where the gap was

When the prize funds arrived, Anaporka did not spend them on visibility or branding. She spent them on infrastructure for people without smartphones. Thirty-five percent funded the backend of a USSD platform, accessible via basic feature phone, no internet required, that lets farmers place service requests, get agronomic advice, and track deliveries through simple code-based interactions. Another thirty percent went into recruiting and training 20 youth agents to handle onboarding and data collection in the field. This is the less glamorous work of agritech: the human and technical layer that makes digital tools real in rural communities rather than just real on a pitch deck.

By the one-year mark, Farmio’s active digital user base had more than doubled to over 9,300. New greenhouse installations were running in the Upper West and Eastern Regions. A rural aggregation hub had opened in the Volta Region. A compact greenhouse kit for peri-urban youth had launched. And Farmio had made its first cross-border move, beginning to export cassava and yams into Nigeria.

Giving farmers a financial identity

One of the year’s most consequential developments was quiet by design. Farmio built a credit scoring system into its SuperApp that generates individualized credit profiles from farmer transaction history, engagement levels, and productivity data, not from bank statements or collateral that most smallholder farmers do not have. The result is a pay-as-you-grow financing model for inputs: accessible, predictable, and one that builds something farmers can use again. It is a small intervention with significant structural implications for who gets to grow.

Alongside this, Farmio introduced automated greenhouse systems with real-time nutrient tracking and climate control, vertical hydroponic towers for urban rooftops and schools, and a beta AI-driven market forecasting tool. These are not separate product lines, they are different entry points into the same vision of a more legible, more equitable value chain.

The buy-back scheme that closed the loop

The part of Farmio’s work that perhaps best captures Anaporka’s instinct for systemic thinking is what happened with rural women in the year after the award. Farmio trained women in the processing and packaging of cassava, chili, and tomatoes into shelf-stable, market-ready products. Then, and this is the part that matters, it created a buy-back programme, purchasing the processed goods that met quality standards and channelling them through its distribution network. Training without a market is a gesture. Training with a guaranteed offtake is a business model.

Within the year, over 120 women had been trained across three rural districts. Sixty percent reported an increase in monthly income from processed sales. Farmio’s own team grew to 34 staff, with 13 women employed, several of whom were promoted into supervisory roles over the period. New hires went into quality control, sales, digital engagement, and logistics.

Recognition finding recognition

The year also brought a cascade of external validation that had real consequences for Farmio’s trajectory. Anaporka was named among the five African winners of the Bayer Foundation Women Empowerment Award, selected from over 1,700 applicants globally, and received the KPMG Africa Best Female Founder Award. A $25,000 grant from the Bayer Foundation followed, directed at enhancing Farmio’s smart agriculture tools. These awards did not just add lines to a CV; they changed how investors saw the company.

Financially, Farmio closed FY2024 with revenue up 37% year-on-year at $580,000, generated $210,000 in Q1 2025 alone, and reached $570,000 by mid-year, a pace that pointed well beyond its earlier projections. Equity investor conversations were progressing in parallel, with Farmio working toward a $1.5 million raise.

A founder reaching outward

Anaporka’s own leadership in the year ran parallel to the company’s expansion. She enrolled in the GCIC SURGE programme, Ghana’s leading climate innovation incubator, sharpening her approach to fundraising, impact measurement, and climate-smart agriculture. She spoke at the Ghana Agritech Women’s Roundtable. She launched a peer mentorship circle inside Farmio, pairing junior female staff with senior women leaders. She continued mentoring young women through Northern Girls In Tech, an organization building digital skills for women in Northern Ghana. The WAYA recognition, she has said, reinforced something personal: the confidence to lead with both strategy and care, and to be intentional about bringing other women along.

What Farmio represents, a year out from its WAYA recognition, is a particular kind of agritech ambition: not scaling for its own sake, but scaling because the problems it is solving are large enough to demand it.