The OCP Agritech Special Prize awarded to the Ivorian startup GRACI

• An innovative concept that highlights the notion of the Green Revolution shared by the OCP Group.
• Through this award, OCP reiterates its commitment to the development of innovative initiatives for sustainable agriculture on the continent.
Casablanca, the 25 January 2018 – Solid card for the second edition of the “Startup Of The Year Africa” ​​(SOTYA) prize, initiated by Startup.info, 1er collaborative magazine of startups, with the OCP Group, the world leader in the phosphates market and derivatives. This year, more than 600 startups took part in the 2018 edition and more than 12 000 online votes were collected to elect the most innovative startups on an African scale.
The jury of the 2018 edition of SOTYA, composed of renowned experts, met today at the awards ceremony at the Technopark in Casablanca, to nominate the winners of various SOTYA awards, including the winner of the OCP Agritech Special Award, specializing in agriculture.
And it is the Ivorian start-up GRACI (Grace Agricole of Ivory Coast), working for the improvement of rice production in Ivory Coast which has won this prize. The company offers a program of production, certification and dissemination of improved seeds for the rice sector.
After studying the fertilization potential of the land and the diversity of cultivable rice varieties, the GRACI founding team notes that the yield per hectare of Ivorian rice growers does not exceed 40%. In question, the lack of control of seed selection. The startup creates the SAVE RICE Côte d’Ivoire program to develop Certified Rice Enhanced Seeds, thus guaranteeing certification and production management.
This initiative is in line with the ambition of the OCP Group, which, as an African group operating internationally, aims to contribute to food self-sufficiency on a continental scale. Several actions have also been carried out by the OCP Foundation in this direction in order to help the development of the agricultural sector, in particular through the establishment of a study whose recommendations aim to support this sector in the basin of the region. Mano River encompassing, besides Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea Conakry.