Last May, I was lucky enough to be awarded a grant from the Cansbridge Alumni Endowment Fund (AEF) to support the development of my start-up, Vunatec.

I have a thesis about the world. I believe that we are headed towards a global food crisis. It’s not the most uplifting thesis, but on the bright side, I also believe that we have everything we need to prevent the crisis if we act urgently.

(I’ll publish a separate article soon fully detailing why I think this and what I believe the solution is, but in short the green revolution of the 1980s which prevented an estimated 2 billion deaths due to famine through industrialized farming techniques completely missed Africa, which contains 60% of the world’s arable land and is thus the key to preventing a potentially even higher death toll due to famine in the foreseeable future.)

A bit of context: I have always cared very deeply about the environment, and from a pretty young age I decided that I wanted to devote my life to having as large of an impact on mitigating climate change as I could. For a while I thought that would be through the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) industry, until I did some digging into the global food system and realized how much of an impact it has on climate change and the environment and completely switched gears (pun intended — though I realize ZEVs don’t have actual gears).

About a year into researching food systems, I met Betty Mbithi and Andrew Wambua through the Y Combinator founder matching platform (make an account right now!). They are both born and raised Kenyans who have seen the issues faced by smallholder farmers in Africa firsthand and wanted to do something about it. They introduced me to the issue of post-harvest losses, and a few months later the three of us started a company together — Vunatec.

At Vunatec, we are building a digital ecosystem of smallholder farmers in Kenya. Our main goals are to help farmers reduce their post-harvest losses from 40% down to 10% or less, while more than doubling their incomes. We are doing this by delivering education and training to smallholder farmers and connecting them to market through a mobile app. With the support from AEF, I was able to travel to Kenya this past summer to better understand the needs of farmers and define what needs to happen on the ground in order for our efforts to make a meaningful difference. This article is the first of three progress updates I will be writing to document the development of Vunatec over the next year or so.

The intentions I had for my visit to Kenya this summer were the following:

Interview as many farmers as possible to deeply understand their challenges and the root causes of those challenges
Meet with as many stakeholders as possible to understand the supply chain and develop strategic partnerships
Align with Betty and Andrew on our goals for Vunatec and our strategy for reaching them

Throughout the six short weeks I was there, I made a ton of progress on all three of these goals, and as I mentioned in my previous article this trip made it very clear to me how crucial it is to be on the ground and working face-to-face with the farmers. I was able to make more progress is those six weeks than I did in the prior 3 months.

Here’s a snapshot view of what my team and I were able to accomplish this summer, with more details following below:

Goal 1

Interviewing farmers was an extremely eye-opening experience, not only for guiding the mission of Vunatec and informing what we are building, but also for me from a personal standpoint. After working on Vunatec remotely for a year and half, it was incredible to finally interact with the people whom I had been helping for so long. It made me feel even more motivated to make Vunatec succeed and helped me better understand the nuance and context of the problem I am working to solve.

The nature of the interviews was quite informal. Though I asked similar questions to the farmers I talked to, I didn’t have a set list of questions that I asked every time. My goal was just to learn about the daily lives of these farmers, and to try and understand the root causes of the challenges they were facing. Some examples of the most common questions I asked were:

How long have you been farming?
What kind of crops do you farm?
Do you have a mobile phone, and if so, what do you use it for?
What are the biggest challenges you face?
Have your crops been affected by climate change? When did you first notice climate change?
How/where do you sell your crops?
Are you open to learning more about using technology?

Majority of the farmers I interviewed were in their 40s or 50s and were farming primarily avocados among other common crops like maize and beans. All the farmers I talked to had mobile phones, and many of them owned cell phones. Despite this, they only used their devices for calling, texting, and sending or receiving money because they lacked the knowledge of how to use them for anything else. This indicated how crucial it will be to provide training to farmers if we want them to start using a digital interface to sell their produce. When asked what their biggest challenge was, most farmers mentioned how difficult it is to find market for their produce during harvesting season. Many also mentioned the challenge of not having proper inputs (like pesticides and fertilizer), or not knowing when they should harvest due to unpredictable seasons and weather patterns (a symptom of climate change). Surprisingly, many of the farmers reported that they had first noticed climate change as early as 2006, and that they had not seen a “normal” season for at least the past ten years. All the farmers were very open to and excited about the idea of being trained on how to use technology.

Videos of the interviews are currently being translated and edited and will be posted soon! Once that’s done, I will write a more thorough publication detailing all the findings from the interviews and key quotes from them.

Goal 2

When my team and I were not visiting rural areas to interact with farmers, we were meeting with stakeholders in Nairobi to start building strategic partnerships. The most notable meetings were with Hekima University, Kenya Plant Health Inspection Service (KEPHIS), and Africa Global Logistics. Hekima University is a new university being built near Naivasha that is focused on agricultural education. Vunatec traveled to Naivasha to tour the campus and help run a workshop on entrepreneurship for youth in the surrounding community. We are planning to partner with Hekima by hiring student interns from the university and contributing to an innovation center on the campus. We will also potentially try to establish a small demonstration farm somewhere on the campus.

Photo of the Vunatec team after running an entrepreneurship workshop for youth at Hekima University

A 3D mockup of the proposed Hekima University campus that will be built

Another very helpful partnership that Vunatec began to develop was with KEPHIS, or the Kenya Plant Health Inspection Service. In the future, we plan to help the farmers we work with export their produce since there is an oversupply and because it is a lot more profitable to export than it is to sell domestically. We had a meeting with a KEPHIS representative who walked us through all the steps involved in getting approved for export. Though we are not yet ready to start exporting at this point, it was an important first step in preparing to become licensed exporters and in building a strong relationship with KEPHIS.

One more partnership we pursued that I will mention was with Africa Global Logistics. They are a global company that coordinates the transport of produce for export, and it was another important step towards preparing to become exporters ourselves. We visited the office and spoke to a representative to familiarize ourselves with the process and requirements of working with them, and to strengthen our relationship with the company.

Jesse Pound, Andrew Wambua, and Nicole Mbithe visiting the AGL office

Goal 3

Arguably the most important part of my trip to Kenya was aligning with my cofounders on our strategy and goals for the coming year. With help from our advisor, Reuben Mbindu, we drafted a long-term business plan and mapped out the entire Vunatec ecosystem the way we imagine it to be a few years from now. We also aligned on our goals for the coming year, which are outlined at a high-level below:

1. Iveti pilot project

We have started a pilot project in a small, rural village called Iveti with 30 avocado farmers. We have partnered with an agronomist to provide them with training and will be testing our USSD and SMS systems to connect them to market during harvest season.

2. Avocado demo farm

We have acquired a small plot of land with around 100 avocado trees that we plan to transform into a demonstration farm. Over the next year, an agronomist will help us apply certain permaculture techniques to optimize the trees growth and create a sustainable ecosystem. We then plan to host workshops and training sessions at the farm for the farmers we work with.

3. Product development

We are aiming to develop an MVP of our database within the next month, and create USSD and SMS systems that are ready to be tested with farmers by this upcoming May.

4. Funding acquisition

As we progress, we plan to continue applying for various funding opportunities such as grants and accelerators to help us progress in these early stages

Final Remarks

Overall, I am very pleased with the progress Vunatec made over the summer and incredibly excited for the future. There is so much work ahead of us and none of it will be easy, and as I finish university over the next two years I won’t be able to spend as much time in Kenya as I would like, however I plan to spend a few months there next summer and once I graduate I will likely be spending majority of my time there in order to grow Vunatec.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you have feedback or would like to learn more about what we are doing, and stay tuned for future updates and content. I have so many ideas for things that I want to write about and still so much to share about my trip, so content creation will be a major priority for me in the coming weeks.

I want to again extend a huge thank you to the AEF for making both this past summer and my continued progress on this project possible. Neither I nor Vunatec would be where it is today without their support, or without the amazing Cansbridge community. Speaking of Cansbridge, applications for the 2024 cohort have just opened! If you are an ambitious, entrepreneurial Canadian undergraduate student, you should apply. The fellowship includes a $10K stipend to complete an internship anywhere in Asia, a week-long bootcamp in Silicon Valley, and access to a close-knit community of like-minded individuals.

Empowering Smallholder Farmers in Kenya