About Us

Project Sparrow is designed to stimulate angel investments and concessionary loans into a carefully selected portfolio of innovative SMEs that will identify and impact at least 25,000 farmers across 5 agricultural value chains (Cowpea, Soya, Maize, Rice and Aquaculture). These start-ups will be prepared for investments via an investment readiness program that gets them to a carefully selected pipeline of entities in the focus sector. This will enable them to rapidly prototype while digitizing, gain commercialization and market entry advice, get direct support for their fundraising, and even more critically gain advice for business growth and expansion after successful financing. Project Sparrow is in line with the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative to improve “agriculture productivity by connecting smallholder farmers to resources (often developed by scalable innovative SMEs)”.

The goal of Project Sparrow is to improve Nigerian smallholder farmers’ productivity and livelihood in the Feed the Future states and value chains, to reduce risk of local and global investments in selected agribusinesses and AgriTech companies, to achieve higher productivity, better returns, inclusive growth and access to finance through SMEs that have been supported through an accelerator program.

Project Sparrow is supported through a co-investment grant from the USAID-funded West Africa Trade & Investment Hub (Trade Hub). The Trade Hub is a 5-year, $140 million trade and investment facilitation activity designed to improve private sector productivity, profitability, and competitiveness in West Africa through market-based approaches. By working in partnership with the private sector and fostering co-investments through its Co-Investment Fund, the Trade Hub generates new private-sector capital investment in key sectors to create jobs and increase trade between the United States and West Africa.

To learn more about the Trade Hub, visit: https://westafricatradehub.com/