Battora CEO Takes Centre Stage at WFP and Japan-Backed Agri-Forge with ToraLoad’s plan to transform Zimbabwe’s agricultural logistics

Tanyaradzwa Chikopera, Battora CEO, presented a technology-driven vision for tackling one of Zimbabwean agriculture’s critical challenges — moving produce efficiently from farm to market and building a more resilient food system.

There are startup pitches, and then there are moments where the problem being presented is far bigger than the company trying to solve it.

For Tanyaradzwa Chikopera, that moment came at Agri-Forge, where he took centre stage to present ToraLoad and its vision for changing how Zimbabwe moves agricultural goods.

The platform is tackling a problem that often receives less attention than what happens on the farm itself: what happens after the harvest is ready.

Zimbabwean farmers can grow the crop, navigate changing weather conditions and bring a harvest to maturity, but that produce still needs to move — from farms to markets, processors, warehouses, retailers and buyers. When the right transport is unavailable, expensive or difficult to coordinate, that journey can become another pressure point in an already fragile agricultural value chain.

ToraLoad wants to change that.

The Zimbabwe-built logistics platform connects people and businesses that need to move goods with truck drivers, allowing customers to request transport, compare offers and follow a trip from pickup through to delivery. Its broader mission is to make the movement of goods simpler, more accessible and more transparent through technology and local transport networks.

For agriculture, that model carries much bigger implications.

The movement of produce is not simply a logistics issue. It touches farmer income, post-harvest losses, access to markets and ultimately the resilience of the food system itself.

A programme with serious weight behind it

ToraLoad’s work is now being developed within one of Zimbabwe’s more significant agriculture-focused innovation initiatives.

The Agri-Forge Innovation Challenge 2026 was launched to identify home-grown technology solutions capable of strengthening Zimbabwe’s food system. The initiative is supported by the World Food Programme and the People of Japan, with WFP Zimbabwe working in strategic partnership with the Government of Zimbabwe and Japanese technology company Pegara Japan G.K.

That backing matters.

This is not an innovation programme built around pitch decks alone. Agri-Forge explicitly targets solutions addressing real structural problems across climate-smart agriculture, transportation and logistics, mechanisation, post-harvest storage, smart access points, and market linkages and value chains.

Selected teams gain access to mentorship from Zimbabwean and Japanese experts, business and financial training, deep-learning and generative-AI support, MVP development assistance and opportunities to test their products with real actors within the food system.

For a young Zimbabwean technology company, selection into that environment represents more than recognition.

It creates an opportunity to test whether an idea can survive outside the startup room and actually work within the realities of Zimbabwean agriculture.

And ToraLoad sits directly within several of Agri-Forge’s priority areas: transport, market access, post-harvest efficiency and stronger value chains.

Building the technology — and the network around it

Behind the presentation is a ToraLoad team working on the problem from complementary angles.

Chikopera leads the innovation and technology side of the company, shaping and building the digital platform that underpins ToraLoad’s model.

Alongside him, Shingirai Kondongwe focuses on business development and partnerships — building the relationships across agriculture, logistics and industry required to take the platform from technology into real-world adoption.

That distinction is important.

A logistics platform cannot create impact through software alone.

It needs drivers. It needs farmers. It needs commercial partners. It needs trust. It needs an understanding of how produce actually moves between farms, aggregation points, markets and buyers.

The technology and the ecosystem around it have to grow together.

Kondongwe has publicly described the Agri-Forge experience as one in which the ToraLoad team has been “challenged, mentored and pushed” by WFP and its Japanese partners, particularly around questions of scale, inclusion and impact.

His own research has also focused directly on the relationship between transport failure and post-harvest losses among smallholder farmers, highlighting transport as an often under-examined part of the agricultural supply chain. The research identifies him as a ToraLoad co-founder and describes the venture as a farm-to-market logistics platform operating in Zimbabwe.

It is that problem that gives ToraLoad’s proposition its potential significance.

Growing food is only half the battle

Much of the conversation around agricultural resilience understandably focuses on production.

More efficient irrigation. Better seed varieties. Mechanisation. Climate-smart farming techniques. Access to inputs.

But producing more food only creates value if that food can then move through the rest of the system.

Fresh produce, in particular, operates against the clock.

A farmer may have tomatoes, vegetables, fruit or other perishable crops ready for market, but if suitable transport cannot be secured quickly enough, that farmer risks lost quality, reduced selling prices or, in the worst cases, complete spoilage.

ToraLoad has explicitly positioned agricultural produce as one of the loads its network is intended to move, connecting farmers with transport for journeys to markets, warehouses, processors and buyers.

The proposition is straightforward: make access to transport easier, make pricing more transparent and reduce the uncertainty involved in finding an available vehicle when it is needed.

But if the model works at scale, its impact could stretch much further.

Better logistics can mean shorter delays between harvest and sale.

It can mean broader market access for farmers who may otherwise be limited by the transport options immediately available to them.

It can mean better utilisation for truck owners and drivers who have capacity but struggle to consistently find loads.

And it can mean a more connected agricultural supply chain in which information about demand and available transport moves faster than it does through informal phone calls and fragmented networks.

Technology as part of Zimbabwe’s food resilience

The climate challenge makes that efficiency increasingly important.

As farmers contend with changing rainfall patterns, extreme weather and growing pressure on agricultural productivity, resilience cannot end at the farm gate.

A resilient food system has to be able to grow food, store it, move it and connect it to markets.

That is ultimately what makes ToraLoad’s inclusion in Agri-Forge compelling.

It is not proposing another farming technique.

It is attacking the infrastructure that connects the farmer to the rest of the economy.

And in doing so, it is asking a broader question: what if one of the ways to strengthen Zimbabwe’s food system is simply to make movement work better?

For Chikopera, the idea also reflects a wider pattern in his work.

As CEO of Battora, his work has centred on building technology-led platforms around connection. At ToraLoad, that same platform thinking is being applied to a much more physical problem — connecting loads, vehicles, drivers and markets.

The sector may be different, but the logic is familiar: build the technology that makes fragmented participants easier to connect.

At Agri-Forge, that thinking is now being tested in an environment backed by institutions with global reach and a programme deliberately focused on solutions that can translate into real impact.

For ToraLoad, being selected is therefore not the finish line.

It is validation that the problem is worth solving — and an opportunity to prove that a Zimbabwe-built logistics platform can become part of the infrastructure that helps move the country’s harvest more efficiently.

The ambition is substantial.

Not simply to make it easier to book a truck.

But to help build a system where fewer farmers are constrained by transport, fewer harvests lose value while waiting to move, and technology becomes part of strengthening the journey between Zimbabwe’s farms and the people who depend on what they produce.

Because growing the harvest matters. But so does making sure it gets there.