The start-up, which was born by the hands of university students, has as its main objective to design "sustainable solutions for agriculture".
"AngoCultiva is a start-up that operates in the agricultural sector here in Angola and its main objective is to create sustainable solutions for agriculture", said José Coio, student of Chemical Engineering at the Instituto Superior Politécnico de Tecnologias e Ciências and also a student of Engineering of Petroleum at Agostinho Neto University, in an interview with RFI.
The official explained that, in a first phase, they started a "field study" to analyze what problems exist in the country in terms of agriculture, having pointed out the lack of fertilizers as one of the issues to be solved. "We started by seeing that one of the problems is the lack of fertilizers, which farmers don't have access to. Here in Angola we still don't have a fertilizer industry, so farmers buy fertilizers at a very high price", said the official to RFI.
Thus, as a way of solving this problem, they began "to produce fertilizer", he indicated, adding that "the production of fertilizer is already carried out by local farmers, but (...) the time is very high, it varies from two to six months, for the farmers to have the fertilizers".
In this way, they began to think about how they would be able to shorten this time, having begun "to develop an accelerated composting machine", that is, when they add organic waste it is possible "to obtain that fertilizer in less time", he clarified, quoted by RFI.
Speaking to RFI, José Coio indicated that they are in the "machine validation phase", trying to identify the amount of organic waste that can be placed in the machine and the amount of organic fertilizer that will be able to be produced. "Farmers with this machine will be able to increase production efficiency", he said.
Regarding the purchase of this type of equipment by the farmers, he indicated that in "principle the farmers cannot buy these machines", but they will produce the machines and will "provide a kind of service". "Having this machine in a locality we will be able to mass produce for the farmers", thus not having "the need to buy the machine, having the machine only in the locality they will be able to buy only the fertilizer", he added, quoted by RFI.
Among AngoCultiva's projects, there is also a solution in which they intend to "produce biofertilizers from bacteria", said José Coio in an interview with RFI, where he also highlighted the fact that the start-up had participated in ClimateLaunchpad 2022, after having won the ClimateLaunchpad Angola, having explained that ClimateLaunchpad is the "biggest green contest in the world, which brings together start-ups that are developing sustainable solutions".
José Coio also said that they want to "be a reference" and help farmers: "We want to be a reference here, at national level, and with our start-up to help farmers to produce more because we have several problems in terms of production of foods. We want AngoCultiva to be a reference in the agricultural sector", he said, speaking to RFI.
José Coio was already familiar with the world of start-ups, as he created another one called "Estudante Carneiro", which consists of helping students to "achieve success in the academic phase", he told RFI.
