Kenya (Nairobi)
Most farmers in advanced economies take advantage of a wealth of agricultural information services to support farm management and increase yields and quality of produce. Potato farmers in the UK use a weather-based late blight alert service to help them decide how to manage their crop and irrigation scheduling services help them decide how much to water. Access to these types of services can increase farm income by more than 80%.
However, over 90% of smallholder farmers lack access to any form of agricultural services. This valuable information is not reaching farmers because the marginal cost of delivery in the smallholder market in emerging economies is simply too high. Many smallholders don’t have access to technology (internet, smartphones) which enables service delivery and many service providers focus on easy-to-access farmers, ignoring more geographically dispersed smallholders.
Climate Edge is solving this problem by building a digital marketplace which drastically reduces the cost of delivery for service providers. Services developed by internationally renowned agricultural experts are translated from digital formats to an SMS based delivery mechanism.
Providing a smallholder in Kenya access to the same services as farmer in the UK is an important step towards closing the ‘yield gap’ and supporting small farmers to build a successful and profitable farming business.
Project leader
Paul Baranowski & James Alden, Co-founders; Gabriel Brueckner, Designer
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