It looks like Japan opened the floodgates last week and went gung ho about Africa.
After launching a VC fund and agreeing a $169 million electric vehicle (EV) financing deal in Kenya, Japan also opened its purse in Ghana.
Degas Limited, a Tokyo-based agri-fintech company, pledged to invest $100 million over the next four years to build an AI-powered agricultural hub in Ghana. The hub will span 122,000 acres of space where maize, rice, and soy will be grown alongside facilities for storage and processing.
The AI-powered hub will connect farmers with credit, seeds, fertilizer, and transport, and track crops from planting to market. It will cut waste and raise yields in a country where farming employs over a third of the people but is often held back by poor storage, bad roads, and reliance on rain. Smallholder farmers in particular struggle to get loans or move produce quickly enough to avoid spoilage.
Why this is a big deal: Ghana’s President John Mahama is backing the project, calling it part of his push to make farming less vulnerable and more profitable. Ghana has long wanted to bring more private capital into agriculture, but weak supply chains and lack of trust between banks and farmers have slowed that down.
The big picture: Degas has worked with cocoa farmers, improved regenerative agricultural practices, and financed small-scale farmers in Ghana before, yet it hasn’t made similar bets elsewhere in Africa or Asia. This $100 million plan is its first big swing, and it may show whether Ghana can be a launchpad for Japanese agri-investment across the continent.
