Mamadou Sall recently created Bayseddo, a website intended to help farmers who are struggling to find financing, by facilitating the meeting between the supply and demand for capital. As in the majority of African countries, the difficulties of Access to credit is an obstacle to the development of farms in Senegal, where most of the arable land is not yet cultivated. Mamadou Sall, a young 27-year-old Dakar entrepreneur, therefore decided to tackle the problem of financing head-on-body by creating a platform for connecting African farmers and investors.
Born to a trading mother and a father who worked in the extractive industries, Mamadou Sall was born in Pout, a commune in the Thiès region located east of Dakar. Very young, he sees himself one day integrating the university teaching staff within the Senegalese capital. Anxious to go further in his studies, despite obtaining in 2012 a master’s degree in computerized management at Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis – a fairly honorable level of qualification, he opted for a master’s degree in sciences of management. But an event will radically change the trajectory of the career plan he then envisions: the viewing, in July 2014, of the biopic “Jobs”, a film which retraces the story of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of the American giant Apple computing. Mamadou was immediately won over by the portrait of this American entrepreneur: a visionary innovator, perfectionist and non-conformist, capable of inspiring others. He is now firmly convinced that entrepreneurship is the professional path that best suits him. He therefore stopped his graduate studies to devote himself fully to his new passion. Initially, he contributed to the establishment of Karangue, a social project carried out in partnership with the French telecommunications operator Orange, intended to prevent infant mortality and provide medical follow-up for women via mobile telephony. But it’s probably Bayseddo that is potentially the most bankable and useful to the community. The term Wolof designates an ancestral practice which consisted in bringing together two people, one with few means and the other with material resources, in order to exercise an agricultural activity. In this case, it is a platform that bypasses the classic intermediation scheme between lenders and borrowers: on the one hand, it gives farmers the opportunity to submit their project online to attract the attention of investors; on the other hand, these same investors, by registering on the site, have the possibility of finding agricultural projects with high growth potential. The CTIC Dakar incubator, specializing in information and communication technologies, is helping to develop and improve the pilot site, in addition to the advice provided in entrepreneurial matters since the beginning of 2015.
Even if the www.bayseddo.com platform is currently still in an experimental phase, the craze for this new innovative tool is such that some of the investors who have signed up for it have already financed two farms located in the Dakar region, near Pink Lake; one specialized in green beans and the other in eggplant cultivation.
“Several promises of funding will be honored from the beginning of 2017,” says Mamadou Sall, who strives to establish partnerships with other financiers, because he quickly understood that the nerve of war is the money: the more investors listed on the platform, the more traffic Bayseddo will experience and the faster success will be there.
Well beyond Senegal alone, this young social entrepreneur plans to connect farmers and investors across Africa; a continent that, let’s not forget, has enough agricultural potential to feed the whole planet.
Source: http://www.forbesafrique.com/
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