About Agririgo
Agriculture deserves the same intelligence as any other industry.
The problem we solve
Decisions made blind are decisions made late.
Zambia produces excellent agricultural statistics, but they live in PDFs, arrive months after the season, and never reach the people deciding what to plant, lend, insure or research. 93% of farming households keep no records; three in four household heads have no agricultural training to fall back on when the climate turns.
In 2024 that gap became a catastrophe: the driest season in forty years destroyed 43% of the maize crop, and responders, lenders and farmers alike were navigating with information that was months old.
Agririgo closes that gap, one platform where the nation's agricultural data is current, connected, and usable by anyone.
Our story
Born on Zambian farms, not in a boardroom.
Agririgo is built by Ericolas Technologies in Lusaka, founded by Ernest Kapesa, raised around commercial livestock farming and shaped by more than five years of building, testing and rebuilding agricultural technology for this market.
The journey so far: an early farming app, field research with farmers in Mumbwa and the Copperbelt, a three-drone operations fleet, recognition within the AWS Southern Africa innovation ecosystem, and engineering collaboration with Vontech in Nigeria.
The 2024 drought turned a product idea into a conviction: Zambia's next agricultural decade will be won with data, and that infrastructure should be built at home.
The category we are building
The operating system for agricultural intelligence.
Software gets replaced; infrastructure becomes indispensable. Agririgo is built as infrastructure: the shared layer where datasets, drone imagery, models, maps and field knowledge strengthen one another, so that advisory services, insurance, credit scoring and autonomous operations can all be built on top rather than from scratch.
“Agriculture feeds the world. Better decisions feed the future.”
The Agririgo manifesto · from data to harvest
What we stand for
Values
Farmer-first impact
If it doesn't help someone grow more or lose less, it doesn't ship.
Honest data
Official, compiled and modelled figures are labelled apart. We never dress an estimate as a fact.
Open by default
National data belongs to the nation. The API is free and the sources are cited.
Built at home
Designed in Lusaka for Zambian realities: bandwidth, languages, seasons and soils.
Where this goes
Roadmap
- Open API v1, 12 harmonized datasets
- Zambia Atlas with drought risk modelling
- Drought 2024 open record
- Live weather & World Bank relays
- Satellite vegetation (NDVI) layers per district
- District-level yield and rainfall series
- Rigo-AI soil analysis integration
- SMS / USSD advisories for feature phones
- Farm digital twins built from drone photogrammetry
- Collaborative workspaces where teams label, model and publish together
- Season-ahead yield forecasts for lenders and insurers
- Foundation models trained on African agricultural imagery
Standing on official shoulders
Data sources & licensing
Agririgo aggregates, harmonizes and redistributes public agricultural data with attribution. Everything we publish is CC-BY-4.0; every API response names its sources and its confidence level.
Let's build the data-smart farm together.
Partner with us, research with us, or build on the API today.