The green business accelerating action for equality

Agritech entrepreneur Anaporka is creating powerful social impact for female farmers through climate-smart practices in Ghana.

March 5, 2025

5 mins

About Standard CharteredCommunity investment

It’s a well-known truth that investing in women entrepreneurs makes excellent business sense. A recent return-on-investment (ROI) study found that businesses led by women generate 35 per cent higher ROI and 12 per cent higher revenues on average than those by men.

However, it’s the social returns that increasingly prove most impactful. Evidence on women-led businesses finds that they boost employment and are more proactive environmentally. Moreover, a growing body of evidence suggests that supporting women-led businesses could drive more sustainable impact.

This multiplier potential drives business leader Anaporka every day. “Year on year, we see women-led businesses employ more people and create more opportunities,” she says of the agriculture industry in her native Ghana.

Anaporka is an alumna of Women in Tech, an entrepreneurship programme part of Futuremakers by Standard Chartered (Futuremakers). As the Bank’s global youth economic empowerment initiative, Futuremakers aims to tackle inequality and promote greater economic inclusion. With its projects predominantly targeting women, participants like Anaporka go on to create more jobs in their communities, helping to accelerate action towards gender equality.

Spotlight on social returns

Equality-action in the technology space – where women are particularly underrepresented – is urgently needed. Yet where there are gaps, there are also opportunities to create and amplify social returns. Such returns relate to both households (for example, increase in wellbeing and household spending) and broader society (for example, increase in local economy spending and increased value from the consumption of green products and services).

For more than a decade, Women in Tech has been empowering women-led and tech-enabled microbusinesses in Africa, the Middle East, and the US to scale their solutions and create jobs.

The power of one

Anaporka’s story is a clear example of broad social value generated from investment in just one women entrepreneur – particularly when a microbusiness promotes sustainable practices. 

Anaporka co-founded Ghana-based agritech company Farm.io in 2019. From its beginnings as a “backyard business idea”, Farm.io has evolved to now support thousands of smallholder farmers – mostly women – across Ghana.  

“Generations of our people have been farmers throughout the years,” Anaporka notes. She also recalls the fundamental role she saw women play growing up, including her mother who continued to work on their farm after starting a full-time civil servant job.

With a passion for technology, Anaporka began studying computer science at university. Knowing that most farmers in Ghana are smallholders that only grow enough to feed their families, she began to research how technology could be used to boost efficiency and profitability. With the negative impacts of climate change affecting Ghanaian farmers more each year, Anaporka felt compelled to help “write a better story for my people.”

Funding a domino effect

Farm.io was founded with a mission to use climate-smart principles to help farmers access new resources, reduce water consumption, and increase yields. Additionally, the startup offers farmers training in climate-smart agriculture and access to new markets via its growing network of farmers and buyers.

In just a few years, Farm.io’s impact has been transformative. For example, by supporting the implementation of new irrigation practices, its customers are reducing water use by up to 70 per cent. Moreover, their earnings potential has skyrocketed.

Despite the business growing steadily, Anaporka and her co-founders knew they could do more to empower more women and promote the use of climate-smart technology. However, they also knew that funding opportunities for women entrepreneurs in Ghana are hard to secure.

A partnership between Village Capital (a Futuremakers strategic NGO partner) and Standard Chartered provided the catalyst Farm.io needed. The pilot WiT financing facility was launched in 2023 to help women microentrepreneurs build resilient, scalable businesses.

Anaporka was thrilled to discover the facility, describing it as “instrumental in accelerating Farm.io’s growth,” adding “It helped us scale our operations in key areas. We expanded our technology infrastructure, we’ve onboarded more farmers onto our platform, and strengthened our supply chain to improve service efficiency”.

The support also played a pivotal role in unlocking additional investment interest for Farm.io. “It demonstrated our capacity to effectively utilise funding for tangible impact,” Anaporka says.

Passion drives action on equality

In communities like Anaporka’s around the world, there’s an urgent need to accelerate action towards gender equality. Anaporka shares this sense of criticality, describing her passion to empower women farmers as the “fire in my belly.”

Like her mother before her, Anaporka must juggle her work and home-life responsibilities. She further notes the biases that women in agriculture often face. “In our communities, women are not always perceived as having the ability to do certain jobs,” she explains. “Moreover, in certain communities, the idea that a women should solely work at home is still prominent,” she adds. With the barriers women entrepreneurs face, yet given the powerful social impact they make, Anaporka is determined to expand Farm.io’s reach. Along with her team, she aims to expand Farm.io’s network from 200 to 5,000 farmers over the next few years. With a continued focus on women-led farms, Farm.io’s social impact among communities in Ghana is set to multiply exponentially.

What is Futuremakers?

Launched in 2019, Futuremakers is Standard Chartered’s global youth economic empowerment initiative that helps disadvantaged young people, especially women and people with disabilities, access decent work, and build thriving microbusinesses that, in turn, create jobs.