The average smallholder farmer in Kenya loses 40% of their harvest every single season. This is a tragedy. On most farms in North America, it is unheard of to lose more than even 3% of the harvest. That 40% represents nearly half of these farmers livelihoods, and they are some of the poorest people in the world. Reducing that figure down just to 30% could enable their children to attend school or help them afford electricity. On a more global scale, the world is in a food crisis and is headed for a catastrophe. The number of undernourished people worldwide had consistently been in decline since the early 2000s, but in 2014 it started to rise again and has been on the rise since. In fact, the number of people facing acute food insecurity increased by 10% from 2022 to 2023 alone, and a large portion of that increase was caused by climate change, which unfortunately is disproportionately impacting Africa. The barriers that are preventing smallholder farmers in Africa from doubling or even tripling their crop output are extremely preventable and the technology to overcome them already exists. While there are already many NGOs and charities working to support smallholder farmers, I believe there is a business model that could be implemented to support them that isn’t limited by inconsistent government funding and donations. That is the goal of this project – to build a self-sustaining social enterprise that can scale across Kenya and eventually to other countries in Africa as well. The way we are doing that is by building a digital marketplace and management tool that can be easily accessed and navigated on a mobile phone, which most farmers in Kenya have access to (even in very remote areas). The biggest reasons we have identified for what is causing such high loss rates, based on interviews and conversations with over 600 Kenyan farmers over the course of about two years, are lack of market access and lack of education. So, these issues are what we are focusing on first. When it comes to market access, rural farmers have to rely on brokers who come from the city in order to sell their produce. These brokers often pay very little to the farmers and then sell the fruits for much higher prices in the city. Although the farmers are getting ripped off, they are desperate for cash and don’t have many other choices. We have also noticed that farmers have very little trust in brokers or any buyers for that matter as they have been scammed so much in the past, so when we have tried to work with farmers they often refused to work with us if we could not pay them upfront, even if we promised to pay them triple the amount if they could wait for just 48 hours. If they were able to find buyers through a digital marketplace and get paid upfront through M-Pesa (the mobile banking service of Kenya), they would no longer need to worry about getting scammed or having no options. As for the education piece, that is something we would provide to farmers through in-person workshops and seminars, and hopefully through the digital app later on. This training would be on how to access and use our tool to connect with buyers, as well as best practices for farming with a focus on adapting to changing weather patterns and the related effects. In the short-term, we are working to run a sustained pilot with just 30 farmers in which we work closely with them to build and test our prototype, improve their skills and knowledge, and connect them with buyers during harvesting season. The money from this grant would go towards supporting myself and my two cofounders while we do this, and covering the associated expenses like travel, running workshops for the farmers, and providing financing for the farmers for things like fertilizer and pesticide. Once we have developed a final prototype, we plan to grow the user-base by travelling to other villages and onboarding farmers with the necessary training. In the very long-term, we envision our project becoming an integrated digital ecosystem that not only connects farmers to buyers and helps farmers adapt to climate change, but also connects farmers to input providers, microfinancing institutions, and other farmers. The ultimate goal is to make farming something that is financially sustainable, because it makes no sense that the people who feed the world are the poorest people in the world, especially when so much of the population is hungry.
On paper, I know that I may not be the most qualified to work on this – I am still in university, pursuing a degree that is not directly related (mechanical engineering), and I grew up in Canada, not Kenya. However, I am very young and very ambitious, and I care deeply about the world and about having an impact. I have so much time and energy to devote to this, and I am comfortable taking risks because I’m so early in my career and am lucky enough to have a good support system. I began working on this project about two years ago with two strangers on the internet who were born and raised in Kenya and are both twice my age, and at that point I had never left North America. While I was still in university in Canada, these two internet strangers and I became finalists in a global competition which gave us some funding to work with. At some point throughout the competition, we incorporated our project as a company, and we built and tested multiple different versions of our idea with real farmers. I did as much as I could from across the world, but I knew that if I was serious about this I had to be there and I ended up traveling to Kenya this past summer to meet my cofounders and work on our project from the ground. While I was there, I met with many farmers and potential partners and developed the beginnings of a network in Kenya and a much deeper understanding of the ecosystem and the challenges that farmers face. So, while I may not have grown up in Kenya, I do have some understanding of the issues I’m trying to solve on a deeper level than is possible to obtain through research papers or documentaries (not to say that I haven’t also done A LOT of research). I also have very strong ties to people in Kenya who did grow up there and have experienced those issues firsthand.
I also do have some real experience with entrepreneurship – before this project, I was building a start-up in the wildfire tech space and was able to develop a pilot project and secure some of the early customers in addition to raising $100K in non-dilutive funding. I left that start-up in April because I felt that both it and this project I am now working on had reached inflection points and I wanted to fully focus on this because I believe it has the potential to make a lot more impact. However, my previous cofounder continued with my first start-up, and it is still growing (website: faura.us). Over the years I’ve also worked a number of jobs here and there at similar start-ups, like one that built drones to autonomously spray pesticide on fields. In university, I have managed many consulting projects for real clients through student clubs which enabled me to develop a wide range of skills from data analytics and market research to client acquisition and communication.
I could talk more about other accomplishments or experiences, but I truly believe the reason I am qualified for this is because I possess all the qualities of a good social entrepreneur: I am extremely ambitious, relentlessly optimistic, comfortable taking risks, very hardworking, and a quick thinker. This is genuinely the problem I want to devote my life to solving, and I have a good starting ground to make it happen even if it takes me many more years to reach the level of impact I dream about.
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https://jesse-pound.medium.com/
$5K - $10K...$5K would be enough to support us throughout the pilot project, anything more would help with other expenses directly related to the project!
This article I wrote is a good summary of some of our progress so far: https://jesse-pound.medium.com/vunatec-progress-update-69a9c2dd1d8f
You can also look at our website (but it is out-dated and currently being redone): vunatec.com
I think even if we were able to help transform the lives of just a small group of farmers, even just the 30 farmers in our pilot project, that would be a small success - and the probability of us doing that if we recieve funding is very high (maybe around 90%). But to me, true success would be building a successful company that helps farmers on a much larger scale. If we were able to scale our company across Kenya, and then into other African countries, and many people were using it on a daily basis, THAT would be true succcess. However the chances of that happening are obviously much lower, maybe around 1% or 2%.