WeFarm is taking Africa by storm. The tech start-up first launched in Kenya 10 months ago with the goal of getting vital information to small-scale farmers by SMS and they are now replicating their success in Uganda.
There are now 43,000 farmers in total using WeFarm. Of this number, 5,000 are located in Uganda, after their recent launch there, just one month ago. WeFarm is also available in Peru.
WeFarm offers a peer-to-peer service that enables farmers to ask questions on farming by SMS and receive crowd-sourced answers back from other farmers around the world. Over 100,000 answers have been supplied by farmers in response to other farmers’ questions at the time of writing.
This social enterprise has its sights set on becoming a large global phenomenon, and with the majority of the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers without internet access, the opportunity for growth is huge.
“There is a large inequality in access to information in the world,” says WeFarm founder, Kenny Ewan. “Up until recently, the people who would benefit the most from information are the same people who don’t have an easy way to access the knowledge they need.”
WeFarm changes that with farmers now able to ask questions about agriculture by SMS and multiple receive answers to their questions – usually between 3-5 answers are supplied within a couple of hours of asking a question. The most common questions regard animal husbandry, and the planting, fertilization and harvesting of crops.
WeFarm is a pioneer when it comes to a peer-to-peer system and it forms the foundation of the company’s culture. The inspiration for utilizing farmers’ knowledge stems from Ewan’s personal experience.
Ewan spent seven years living in Peru, working with indigenous farming communities and as a result he strongly believes that the expertise and innovation of small-scale farmers can change the world.
“I frequently saw farmers coming up with low-cost, inventive solutions to the problems they faced. They also have generations’ worth of knowledge and expertise – what they were lacking was a way to share this with other farmers. Grassroots innovations can help us achieve sustainable agriculture on an international scale, rather than top-down initiatives that don’t work on the ground.”
WeFarm also wants to transform the food industry. The tech business maps key data regarding small-scale farmers and supplies this to corporate businesses that rely on smallholders’ produce.
WeFarm’s data can enable food and drink businesses to make better decisions and ultimately, save businesses millions of dollars. For example, coffee rust is a preventable crop disease that wiped out millions of dollars’ worth of coffee produce a few years ago, yet it is entirely preventable. Had coffee businesses known that it was spreading through their supply chains they could have taken simple actions to prevent it from spreading further.
In 2016 WeFarm plans to launch in a number of countries including India, Colombia, Cote D’Ivoire and more, in order to scale to 1 million farmers. Their ultimate goal is to improve the livelihoods of millions of farmers worldwide.
With over 5m interactions shared through WeFarm, and numbers growing every day, they are certainly on to something.
