Agro Mindset founder David Asiamah shortlisted for the African Achievers Award

David Asiamah, founder of Agro Mindset, has been shortlisted for the African Achievers Awards, the agriculture excellence category.

David Asiamah is a young farmer and an entrepreneur.

Mr Asiamah has already been recognised in Ghana as a young achiever and a recipient of Ghana Top 30 Under 30 award. He is a global shaper of the World Economic Forum and belongs to the Kumasi Hub.

His work with Agro Mindset promotes the engagement of youth in agriculture by helping them acquire knowledge and skills to meet career and contemporary industry expectations.

This is done by running a model production farm, a vibrant agriculture education outreach programme, and logistics services to assist promising young farmers and new small-scale farm entrants, to have effective links to market. The purpose of Agro Mindset transcends attention – grabbing; it represents the signpost to a better tomorrow for millions of young people on the continent.

After completing a postgraduate degree from the University of Reading, David Asiamah turned down a number of job offers in international development to start farming in Ghana and has since expanded it into a chain of companies.

The African Achievers Awards is geared at recognising excellent individuals, organisations and governments that have distinguished themselves in their contributions to the growth and development of Africa. The focus is to motivate all Africans on the continent and in the diaspora, particularly current and prospective leaders across diverse fields of endeavour to contribute even more tangibly to the development of Africa in their own way. The first two series of the Awards were successfully held at Kings College London where notable sons and daughters of Africa beginning exclusively with Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu in the first year then others like Her Excellency Joyce Banda, the Late Professor John Evans Atta Mills have been recipients of awards in different categories.

It is in this line of achievement that David has been recognized and shortlisted for formal recognition. With his overarching conviction “if we believe in ourselves and our ideas and if we work together, there is nothing we cannot achieve”, David has demonstrated beyond par what his conviction actually means in verity. A few years down the line, Agro Mindset has achieved significant milestones.

The Agro Mindset Farms, a subsidiary of the group has seen expansion on a grand scale and newer ideas to make it even bigger and more productive have been at the forefront of the group’s plans. The farm produced over a million eggs in less than its first year of operations which is testament of a working model, and a compelling success story of the youth’s engagement in agriculture. Future outlook is to adopt more innovative, cutting-edge technologies to produce animal feed, manage waste, and construct solar power plants. These would further set us apart from the African norm.

Agro Mindset’s targeted approach reaches out to the youth in formal education and also those outside the traditional educational bracket, in cognisance of their vast potential. Its specialist seminars and workshops have reached over 7000 people since its inception.In 2013, Agro Mindset was awarded the Sustainable Business Award at the Ghana UK Based Achievement (GUBA) awardsin recognition of innovation and best practice in corporate sustainability during the period July 2012 – June 2013.

Between 2009 and 2014, David worked on a farm in the UK, where he appreciated and learned first-hand the scale of mechanised commercial farming; this was an eye-opening experience.

In the wake of such an experience in 2009 was Agro Mindset born to facilitate youth engagement in agriculture in a sustainable, industry-relevant manner.

Based on the challenges he faced from starting a commercial farm in Ghana, Mr Asiamah founded a logistics company to assist other young farmers and new farm entrants to have effective links to market.

He explains, “by helping them to commercialise means to increase their engagement with markets; increasing fractions of crops and animal products being destined for sale; increasing inputs and factors of production being acquired from the market: most apparently in machinery and tools, seed, fertiliser, crop protection chemicals, veterinary drugs, animal feed; but also to use markets to hire labour, borrow funds, deal in land acquisition and acquire technical advice and market information”.

Gradually, instead of the traditional buyer-seller relationship of ad hoc transactions all the way along a chain, Agro Mindset is building relationships through which the farmer produces to the buyer’s specifications. Not only do such relationships facilitate the movement of products to consumers, but they also facilitate continual improvements in the chain, something that is impossible with ad hoc transactions.

David believes that the greatest testimony he can give to inspire young people to follow and carry them along to pursue careers in agriculture would be his own practical achievements given his humble beginnings and current strides in the field. David appears to have bigger dreams for his country, our continent as a whole, and its teeming youth.

As indicated, the African continent spends more than 50 billion US dollars importing food every year; David’s dream is to create a continent where the youth would fully take up the mantle of food production to make the continent food secure, and through that create wealth for locals and reduce unemployment.

Despite the fact that agriculture is the mainstay of Ghana’s economy, it remains unattractive to school leavers as a professional or career choice. This includes over 80% of the 10,000 trained annually in departments of agriculture in various universities, threatening the sustainability of the sector over the long term. Creating the right image and interest in agriculture is timely, given the benefits of food security and equitable economic transformation that are drawn from sustainable agriculture. That is what Agro Mindset is seeking to achieve; investing in the future of people, creating jobs in a time of unemployment, and lifting people out of poverty.

David is confident of the critical role that his leadership of youth in agriculture plays in sustaining the fragile sector, and the potential to impart knowledge and skills to other youth keeps him motivated.