(A column highlighting scientific, technological, engineering and design innovation in Africa)
Tired of stories about middlemen offering Kenya’s five million small farmers meager prices for their produce, Kenyans Jamila Abass, Susan Oguya and Linda Kwamnoka created MFarm, a mobile phone software that provides weather conditions and up-to-date market prices to farmers in real time.
The all-girl team of AkiraChix (a support group for female Kenyan geeks) launched their product in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital after winning the inaugural IPO48 competition in 2010. Their company, MFarm Ltd., owns all the software.
IPO48 is an annual 48-hour boot-camp event designed to give web-based and mobile start-ups a platform to launch their concepts.
Using MFarm’s free application, which is available on Samsung android mobile phones, farmers can text the number 20255 (for Safaricom users) to see real-time prices for such crops as peas, sugar snaps, avocadoes, passion fruit, peanuts, potatoes, cassava and mangos. MFarm collects prices daily on 42 crops from wholesale traders in five local cities: Mombasa, Nairobi, Eldoret, Kisumu and Kitale.
Since the launch of its signature price app, MFarm Ltd. has developed a group-selling app for small farmers to team up to take their produce to designated drop-off points, and a group-buying tool that allows farmers to collectively negotiate better prices for equipment and inputs like fertilizer. Similar to the price information app, farmers simply text the designated number to link directly with buyers and input manufacturers, cutting out the middlemen they relied on for price, buyer and manufacturer information.
Payments are made via MFarm’s mobile money transfer system, which draws on MPesa, the popular local mobile payment technology, or which can be plugged directly into a bank account. Farmers may subscribe monthly or yearly to MFarm’s three services. The company earns additional money by taking a small cut from the mobile phone provider, by charging a 10 percent to 15 percent commission on transactions, and by selling its data to organizations that are researching consumer behavior and food scarcity.
To date, some 7,000 farmers in Kenya use the MFarm apps. Additional apps are in the works, such as exporting to overseas retailers and disseminating information about international regulations.
