WATCH: In Conversation with the CEMEA Visa Everywhere Initiative Winner

The Visa CEMEA Everywhere Initiative is a global innovation program and competition for start-ups and fintech companies, designed to support the next generation in digital financing.

We sit down with 2022’s VEI winner Ayo Arikawe Co-Founder and CTO of Thrive Agric an agriculture technology company, based out of Nigeria to discuss how they are creating access to finance through digital payments and their vision to expand their services to 11 million small farmers in Nigeria and beyond. Thrive Agric enables strategic partnerships with financial institutions and agriculture value chain players to provide smallholders with financial services, agriculture inputs, extension, market linkage, e-commerce, and payment services.

Thrive Agric will now go on to the Global Finals in Qatar in November 2022, where they will compete with finalists from all over the world for a cash prize of $100k and many other awards.

About The Visa Everywhere Initiative

Since its inception in 2015, the program has had 8,500 participants and has helped start-ups from over 100 countries collectively raise more than $16 billion in funding, providing vital support to early-stage entrepreneurs.

This year Visa CEMEA alone received over 1,300 submissions – almost double last year's entrees – and expanded into new regions such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. This reflects the substantial growth we have seen in the fintech sector in CEMEA as payment innovators continue to transform the way consumers and businesses make payments – making it easier for people to access the money they need when they need it.

Finalists represented the breadth of the CEMEA region and a range of sectors from healthcare services providers, Carepay and Neqatby, to retail payment solution Qlub and dedicated SME digital payment platform NQOODLET.
Regional winners also included Egypt’s Neqatby, an app which provides healthcare services to the Egyptian Syndicate of Engineers using digitised payments and Saudi Arabia’s NQOODLET, a digital platform that allows MSMEs to manage their finances directly through corporate cards.