Pretty Kubyane remembers what it felt like to plant a crop with no idea who would buy it. On her family’s farm in the Eastern Cape, harvest day meant waking before sunrise, loading the car and driving to the nearest market to wait. There was no agreed price and no guaranteed buyer — whatever offer came at the end of the day had to be accepted, because the produce was perishable and there was no cold storage.
That uncertainty, still common on South Africa’s smallholder farms, is the reason Kubyane built her company, eFama. Of an estimated 2.3-million farmers on the continent, she says only about 40,000 farm under contracts that guarantee them a buyer, a price and a specification before a seed goes into the ground. eFama’s ambition is to bring the rest into the same structured, technology-enabled supply chain — starting in South Africa and spreading across the continent eventually.
Her path to founding a tech company was far from linear. She studied public affairs and worked in management consulting before moving into corporate social investment for mining and manufacturing companies. On one consulting assignment — helping small producers get their goods onto retail shelves — she ran into the problem that would define her career. Retailers wouldn’t stock a product without independently verified proof of its quality and safety, and that verification was priced for corporates, not small producers.
A case study connected her with a US company building a digital supply chain for about 13,000–14,000 farmers, using continuous digital record-keeping to prove compliance and quality. It was, she says, a light-bulb moment: her parents’ decades-old problem could be solved differently. eFama’s first version wasn’t even agricultural; it was a compliance tool for a beauty product, until the team realised the model fitted the food system they’d grown up with.
eFama connects farmers directly with consumers, retailers, restaurants and other buyers. Plenty of platforms do this reasonably well — for farmers who have already solved inputs, compliance and logistics. eFama goes further upstream, building what Kubyane calls “digital infrastructure” spanning the whole farmer-buyer relationship, with ordering, payments and delivery tracking layered on top.
Buyers set specifications — what inputs may be used, what quality standard must be met — and the platform turns these into a contract, requiring farmers to keep digital records proving compliance. With thousands of farmers on the same system, eFama can benchmark an individual’s reported yields and inputs against similar-sized plots, flagging inconsistencies. An in-house forecasting engine projects demand about 90 days out, timed to the planting-to-harvest cycle, so farmers can plant with the confidence of those under formal contracts.
She frames the payoff partly as food security. South Africa produces about 30Mt of food a year, she says, and loses about 10Mt — not for want of quality, but because it isn’t sold in time.
The platform covers fruit, vegetables and meat, with about 5,000 farmers and 6,000 buyers involved nationally, though fulfilment is concentrated in Gauteng. A KwaZulu-Natal pilot is planned for later this year, with Durban and Cape Town next.
Investors questioned how someone without a technical background could lead a tech company. So Kubyane taught herself to code. She designed the company’s demand-forecasting engine and holds more than 40 technical certifications earned through self-directed study.
Unusually, eFama’s capital has come largely from corporate partnerships with Google, Meta and Amazon rather than venture capital, without giving up equity. Agriculture, she says, doesn’t fit venture capital’s return timelines.
The biggest constraint on the company’s growth is onboarding. Every farmer needs document verification and a physical farm visit before trading, at about R2,850 each. eFama, which operates with a lean team of just eight, has automated its onboarding interviews with AI agents; a process that once took five hours now handles about 20 farmers a day. It also relies on corporate sponsorships — Old Mutual, for instance, funded the vetting of around 100 farmers last year. The company is building API links to government databases to reduce its reliance on costly third-party checks.
Her three-year milestone is 100,000 farmers and a million users overall, including a move into direct household sales. Expansion plans also include eFama-built packhouses so that farmers without post-harvest infrastructure aren’t excluded.
Kubyane, who owns the largest stake in the business, is one of a handful of women leading a company in African agritech. Her recent Bold Future Award from Veuve Clicquot has opened doors and, she says, brought a different kind of pressure: “Every time I get an e-mail with ‘Veuve Clicquot’ in it, it’s almost like a confrontation … It’s good pressure.”
