The AgUnity platform addresses service delivery and management issues, introduces a new business model and ensures market transparency across the agricultural value chain. Quality optimization ensures a premium price is paid by higher-end niche market and yield as much as three-fold income at farmer’s level. Strengthening value chain affects employment up and down the stream. Men and women take up different roles in the AgUnity/TP cocoa model: women farmers look after the cocoa bud nursery and cocoa harvesting while the males and youths perform the heavy farm work, the fermenters, driers, co-operative, storage, dispatch. Impact to community’s skills, attitudes and knowledge will be significant as it seeks to optimize extension services and utilization of administration, training and resource center for both cocoa production and life skills diffusion.

AgUnity primarily is dedicated to empowering small farmers, improving trust and transparency through optimizing co-operatives operation and communication. Through the application of Blockchain, smartphone and IOT technologies, our vision is to create social economy networks for rural societies; a framework to improve trust and increase the efficiency of co-operatives/farming communities around the world. Small holder farmers’ better level of accountability and equity will affect overall supply chain resilience of the respective commodity, and in turn significantly impact their livelihood. AgUnity mission is a vital mission for humanity, an opportunity to impact millions of people in a profound and positive way, on a scale which could be historically significant. The innovation applies for more than one level of supply chain: The AgUnity App is designed for both individual farmers and the cooperatives levels—addressing their concurrent challenges: replacing unreliable paper records with smartphones and using blockchain for ensuring all transactions are recorded in a way that is permanent and immutable. AgUnity approach is a combination of world class technology with on-the-ground expertise—its solution is designed by living and working for months right alongside farmers in remote communities, ascertaining full understanding of their challenges. Beyond farmer and co-operatives level, AgUnity v3 enables further level(s) of transaction to be streamlined in the system, enabling buyers/consumers’ traceability down to farmers’ level—which will in turn present greater opportunity for farmers to leverage their produces in the market. Successful pilot projects of AgUnity v2 in Kenya and Papua New Guinea with wheat and cacao farmers respectively, proved that the AgUnity solution can enable the farmers to generate a material increase in their incomes, in both cases by as much as 3x. The income is achieved because the solution gives competitive advantages to smallfarmers in the eyes of their buyers and internally enables the farmers to trust each other and cooperate better as a group rather than doing everything individually. Not less important than integration of supply chain links, once farmers develop habits of recording transactions through their smartphones, the platform also creates the opportunity for farmers and co-operative to leverage for other enabling factors critical to agriculture such as finance, insurance, logistics, trainings and e-commerce. On this innovation phase, AgUnity app V3 also involves integration of marketplace functions, whereas farmers can collectively access (purchase / rent / subscribe to) products and services pertinent to their agricultural practice and betterment of their livelihood quality. Down the line, the app is envisaged to be an open platform where public APIs allows third party collaborators to provide better experience and space for innovation (I.e. financiers, insurers, warehouses, logistic company, etc).

Over 500 million smallholder farmers earn their income from Agriculture, yet up to 50% of a farmer's crop value 'vanishes' between harvest and sale. Huge inefficiencies in planning, and a lack of access to proper farming resources results in poor harvests, spoilage of crops and poor prices at point of sale. Farming cooperatives are the most effective and equitable way to increase farmer's incomes by overcoming these inefficiencies, however poor record keeping and a lack of transparency often results in corruption and graft."

"It’s true that we could have built a standard database for the documentation of farmer’s transactions with farming co-operatives / other third-party partners. However, the issue we’re tackling is around a lack of trust between a farmer and a co-op, so we would effectively be asking them to trust in the same system that typically leads to corruption and graft, except that they have to trust AgUnity who they know even less well that their existing partners. The use of a blockchain enables us to explain to farmers that once a transaction is agreed to by both parties, no one, not the farmer, not the co-op, not even AgUnity can ever change this record. It also provides an additional layer of security to ensure these transactions cannot be hacked by third-parties who may wish to transfer receipts from the farmers to themselves. So in short, no, we couldn’t do what we do without the use of a blockchain!"