Shell Foundation has partnered with Startup Discovery School to launch the West Africa Aggregator Service Platform (WAASP) to boost income growth for women smallholder farmers.
Shell Foundation is an independent charity that empowers underserved customers to raise their incomes while lowering emissions, with support from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO),
Startup Discovery School (SDS), meanwhile, designs and manages innovation programmes focused on climate, gender and inclusive economic growth across Africa, Asia and the UK.
WAASP is a one-year pilot programme operating in Ghana and Senegal. The initiative will explore whether existing climate-smart agricultural solutions can have a practical and transformative impact on women smallholder farmers through redesigned delivery models.
It will test service-based, shared and layaway delivery models designed to reduce upfront costs, distribute risk and make proven agricultural technologies viable for women farmers. It targets at least a 20 per cent increase in incomes while establishing scalable pathways to reach 200,000 farmers – at least half of them women – by 2030.
SDS will coordinate structured six-month validation cycles to test delivery models through three established farmer networks – myAgro in Senegal, Vitara and Complete Farmer in Ghana. These networks collectively serve more than 500,000 smallholder farmers across the two countries, working in value chains with high women farmer participation.
The initial cohort of solution providers includes:
- Synnefa (smart solar drying technology) ;
- ColdHubs (solar-powered cold storage) ;
- Irri-Hub (solar irrigation systems).
Additional providers – offering low cost fertiliser and climate-smart poultry – have been selected for alignment with women farmers’ cashflow realities and scalable service-based deployment.
Each solution will be assessed against common performance criteria, including adoption, retention and measurable income effects. Models failing to demonstrate commercial viability or income improvement will be adapted or discontinued. Validated approaches will be integrated into aggregator operations to establish sustained distribution pathways rather than stand-alone pilots.
“WAASP is testing whether coordinated, service delivery can scale climate-smart agriculture with women at the center. This partnership brings major public and philanthropic funders – including Shell Foundation, the UK FCDO, Autodesk Foundation and ACIAR – alongside strong regional delivery partners, reaching over half a million farmers in Ghana and Senegal,” said Jonathan Berman, CEO of the Shell Foundation.
“Many proven technologies fail to reach women farmers because delivery models are misaligned with their cashflow and risk profile. WAASP allows us to coordinate disciplined validation across networks and identify models that can scale sustainably. Over the next year, WAASP will publish findings on adoption, income outcomes and delivery economics to inform expansion across the region,” said Mandy Nyarko, CEO of SDS.
