Karandaaz Partners with GrowTech To Digitize Agricultural Value Chain

December 19, 2022: Karandaaz Pakistan has partnered with GrowTech Services
(www.growtechsol.com), to facilitate digitalized data driven scientific based agriculture
practices in Pakistan and facilitate financial inclusion in the agricultural value chain.
Under its “Pilot to Scale” program, Karandaaz has committed a grant to GrowTech Services,
testing the impact of digitization of traditional agricultural value chain, on two different
crops. The project will foretake the development of an E-Commerce portal, connecting
farmers and bulk buyers, and integrate the GrowTech app and e-commerce platform with
various payment gateways. This partnership aims to increase the penetration of this App
among farmers and promote usage of digital payments through the e-commerce platform.
When speaking about the importance of digitizing agricultural value chains, CEO Karandaaz
Waqas ul Hasan said, “Pakistan seriously lags behind its peers in farm productivity. We need
to approach complex agricultural value chains from all possible intervention points.
Farmers, in general, are hesitant in adopting digital payments and technology due to the
often-complicated procedures involved. As a result, their productivity and income has
remained low. Digitizing payments will bring previously unbanked farmers within the formal
financial sphere. The data collected from their spending patterns can then be used to create
additional interventions.”
Mr. Shahnawaz Mahmood, Co-Founder GrowTech Services said: “Our focus is to enhance
productivity and decrease input-costs for farmers with the objective to improve per acre
yield which is important in an agrarian economy like Pakistan. For this purpose, we remain
engaged with farmers throughout the crop cycle. We are excited to partner with Karandaaz
to make agricultural commerce more efficient with better price discovery and promote
digital payments in this sector while providing trainings to farmers. In future this will be
useful to develop innovative credit scoring models based on new data points.”
This project, through its solutions, aims to resolve a multitude of problems that exist due to
traditional agriculture value chains. The focus will remain on removing the gaps and
inefficiencies while digitizing the agricultural value chains resulting in a higher economic
activity for all actors of the value chain while also increasing financial inclusion of value
chain actors and their use of digital payments.
About Karandaaz
KARANDAAZ PAKISTAN is a not-for-profit special purpose vehicle set up under Section 42 in August 2014.
Karandaaz is the implementation partner of the Enterprise and Asset Growth Programme (EAGR) and
Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) programme of UK's Foreign, Commonwealth &

Development Office (FCDO). SEED is grant funded by FCDO whereas EAGR is co-funded by FCDO and Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation on grant basis.
Karandaaz promotes access to finance for micro, small and medium-sized businesses through a double bottom
line investment platform and financial inclusion for individuals by employing technology enabled solutions.
About GrowTech Services
GrowTech is an Agri-Tech company, working countrywide, committed to achieve excellence in precision
agriculture and modern farming in order to increase yield for the farmers. GrowTech aims to accomplish the
objectives through high tech advisory channel while using soil analysis, plant health analysis, water stress
analysis, zoning & weather for individual and corporate farmers. The company’s objective, is to reduce
input cost, increase land recovery, manage sustainability in farm production on long term basis, improve
farmers profitability, introduce financial inclusion for the farmers and improve digitalized data driven scientific
based agriculture practices in Pakistan.