Optimized Solar Dryers for Rural Dev

The Optimized Solar Dryer is an initiative for village agro-processing using local materials, which aims to:

1.Reduce post harvest losses, food wastage and generate additional income through value added dried products

2.Develop a sustainable business model for economic empowerment of farmers and the creation of jobs for rural entrepreneurs.

Small scale farmers in Africa lack the means to procure post-harvest dryers to preserve food. Post-harvest drying equipment is limited, with no available options for smallholders to buy ready-made dryers. Woodfired ovens is a major factor in widespread deforestation in cocoa growing regions by small-scale cocoa farmers who use wood to dry cocoa. Not only does wood ovens produce smoke that causes pollution, but also causes respiratory illnesses, global warming and climate changes.

The technology could have a wide reach for smallholder farmers and cocoa producers that are burdened with low quality cocoa due to drying difficulty in the rainy season  

Cameroon produces about 10 million tons of fruits and 25 million tons of vegetables per year, but just less than  2% of this is processed. Over 20-40% is spoiled due to lack of storage and improper handling, and the rest of the produce is sold at very cheap prices during the harvesting season or consumed in fresh form. 

90% of subsistence farmers and small-scale Cocoa farmers face enormous post harvest losses because of lack of efficient drying methods for their produce.

To solve this problem, some of them resort to continue cutting down trees for their wood fired ovens to dry their crops such as cocoa. Amba Farmers Voice (AFV) aims to train small scale farmers in the construction of simple, practical and affordable solar dryers using local materials within their community. AFV hopes to arrest this situation by providing personalized training to small scale rural farmers in constructing  their own simple and affordable solar dryers using local materials available in their local areas. 

AFV is an African startup that trains farmers in the making of appropriate modular solar dryers and other agricultural equipment such as hydroponics systems, maggot growing ponds from local materials for use by subsistence farmers. The Optimized Solar Dryer is used in drying staple crops such as maize, beans, sorghum, pigeon peas, bitter leaves, huckleberry, tomatoes, mangoes, cocoa and coffee up to 75 times faster than the traditional method of drying in the sun, cutting drying time times by days or even weeks, especially during the rainy season. .

The Optimized Solar Dryer is a portable direct type which consists of a rectangular shaped box made with a transparent top and blackened interior surfaces. A clear polyethylene plastic is placed over the heat collector to allow solar radiation to heat the air. A black material is also placed under the chamber to absorb the heat and to keep out moisture from the ground. Another black polyethylene sheet is also placed over the drying chamber to prevent bleaching. Ventilation holes allow ambient air to enter the heating chamber, and another opening at the rear of the drying chamber allows moist air to escape from the unit by natural convection air movements. 

This dryer is most suitable for drying the small quantities of food and commercial crops like cocoa produced by farmers; fruits & vegetables that are abundant in the rainy season which often rot for lack of storage facilities. This dryer is also useful to farmers raising heifer cows, goats & pigs to dry fresh fodder for feeding the animals in the drying season when there is shortage of fresh grass. Using Pidgin as the language of instruction, farmers will be provided hands-on training in the construction of these solar dryers. 

These Solar dryers will help solve many of the problems that are associated with sun drying and help farmers get more money for their produce since the quality of the dried produce will be enhanced by the solar dryers, this will in turn have a net effect on their income and the food supply of the nation. 

These dryers serve women in rural areas who for the most part are responsible for growing food to feed their families. They are  suitable for drying small quantities of food at a time depending on the size of the dryer. Subsistence farmers who produce fruits & vegetables that are abundant in the rainy season and often rot for lack of storage facilities. This dryer is also useful to farmers raising heifer cows, goats & pigs to dry fresh fodder for feeding the animals in the dry season when there is shortage of fresh grass.   The dryers can be used for all farm produce by both subsistence and commercial farmers.

Using Pidgin as the language of instruction, farmers will be provided hands-on training in the construction of these solar dryers. 

The OSD enhances incomes of subsistence women farmers; promotes a renewable energy source, and produces quality value added food products. One dryer can dry 4 kg/day. If used 250 days/year it will dry one ton, and save 3.24 tons of CO2. We have trained 109 farmers and installed over 20 solar dryers for subsistence farmers. The potential greenhouse-gas savings if 800 dryers are installed, will be about 2,500 tons CO2/year.

The OSD promotes renewable energy and reduces tree cutting for woodfired ovens.  With available funding, we could train up to 1000 farmers this year. 

The OSD reduces vegetables, fruits, grain and seed spoilage, improves the end-product quality, and enables smallholder farmers to generate more income by selling their higher value produce.  Easily portable (e.g. by motorcycle), the OSD can earn smallholder farmers US$ 500 per year as an income-generating business, paying off the initial investment within one harvest season.

We have trained  109 smallholder farmers in the following communities in the North West Region of Cameroon:

XXXXX Village: April 7-21, 2021

Men: 07

Women: 25

Total: 32

XXXX Village: April 22-30, 2021

Women: 8

Men: 15

Total: 23

XXXX Village: May 13-23, 2021

Men: 20

Women: 7

Total: 27

XXXXXX Village: May 25-June 2, 2021

Men: 12

Women: 15

Total: 27

We have the following upcoming trainings:

XXXXX - North West Region

XXXXX - South West Region Cameroon 

XXXXXX- South West Region, Cameroon

XXXXX - South West Region, Cameroon

The OSP optimized solar drier is a modular energy efficient, simple and practical drying technology that is built with local materials such as bamboo that are found in almost all villages in Cameroon. Besides the traditional uses of the solar dryer for fruits and vegetables, our model is designed specifically for very very small scale farmers at the base of the pyramid with more uses envisaged. Farmers now use it to dryer abundant fresh grass in the rainy season for use in the dry season as animal fodder when there is no fresh grass. Farmers also use it to dry maggots raised as chicken and fish feed. 

Another innovative feature of the dryer is that it is simple enough for rural women with little or no formal schooling to build it and it significantly reduces post-harvest loss and provides a stable income for approximately 109 farmers that we have trained already. 

The use of the OSD is much more beneficial cost wise to the farmers compared to traditional open sun drying methods and improves the superiority of the product. 

For storage of food other options are cold storage and drying. Cold storages is not feasible for subsistence rural farmers due to expensive and unreliable electricity, lack of good road network to take fresh food to the markets and the unavailability of skilled man-power. Open sky drying is very time consuming and inefficient. Open sun drying suffers from issues of low nutrition, color-flavor loss, contamination and 10-30% losses during drying.  

We have already trained 109 small scale farmers. There are many more trainings that are lined up. In one year, we hope to train over 1000 farmers. In five years, we anticipate to train over 1000.000 farmers with appropriate funding. 

The villages that have gotten several solar dryers reported that their produce dries faster in the Solar Dryer than it did outdoors, and that the nutritional properties of the produce are better retained. The decentralized Optimized Solar is cost-effective, easy to build and suitable for rural areas of Cameroon where subsistence farming is highly concentrated. The widespread use of Solar Dryer would have a huge impact, enhancing the storage of produce during harvests and reducing post-harvest losses, all of which means an increase in the availability of food and a major reduction in food waste.

2 Full time staff

1 part-time staff

Isaac Zama, Founder of Amba Farmers Voice is a lawyer by training and holds a Ph.D. in International Development from the Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He has spent most of his career working in the US, Cameroon, and also taught community forestry and rural development at the Ecole Nationale des Eaux et Forets in Gabon.

Amba Farmers Voice (AFV) is an Agricultural Education program produced in collaboration with SCBC TV to assist Southern Cameroons farmers & refugees with skills & appropriate technology to increase food production as they undergo the civil war taking place in Cameroon. Southern Cameroons is endowed with fertile agricultural land and hard workers, but most farmers still practice subsistence agriculture, due to lack of information, capital and extension services.

Our mission is to ensure that every Southern Cameroonian farmer & refugee has access to practical & quality agricultural education to increase food production.

It is our vision to reframe agricultural education by shifting the subsistence agricultural paradigm to a process that integrates cost effective & practical innovative solutions to inspire personalized learning & community-based farming.

AFV is committed to UN SDG #4, which “ensures inclusive & equitable quality education & promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”.

Other member of our team have years of farming experience and have been trained in various technologies such as hydroponic systems for animal fodder, maggot rearing, air layering for tree propagation and the collection and use of human urine as organic fertilizers.

Our vision and strategy is to ensure that the message that diversity matters comes from the CEO. Our team includes Christians and a Moslem. We have set up an unbiased process for interviewing and recruiting process as well as the establishment of strategic partnerships with organizations churches and farmer cooperatives through which we can be connected with a diverse talent pool. 

We plan to invest in leadership development to retain high performers. As of now, we employ a range of formal and informal professional development tools, such as mentoring, coaching, and education using videos via whatsapp. 

As our organization grows, we plan to regularly evaluate internal talent to ensure that employees of all backgrounds are in the leadership development pipeline. 

Another important approach we have adopted is encourage prompt and ongoing discussions on activities in the field. We regularly engage in open, honest, and multidirectional dialogue at different levels, and work on developing a shared understanding that achieving success involves the input of all team members. 

We hope that our participation will provide us the exposure and hopefully secure partnerships with organizations that are already well implanted and working with small scale farmers in developing countries. We also would like to win the challenge and use the money to scale up our training and building of more solar dryers to reach many more farmers in the villages. 

We are applying to the Solve because besides the grant money, we are interested in becoming part of Solve's MIT powerful network of social entrepreneurs through whom we can learn from. Furthermore, being a small social enterprise, we hope to be able to gain advice from experts with experience in running successful social enterprises. The media exposure that MIT Solve provides to social entrepreneurs could lead us to find partners that may be able to help us in our work. 

Pitching to investors is a sure way to raise capital to run the businesses. As a social enterprise, we are interested in seeking partnerships that can help us with crowdfunding expertise. Crowdfunding will give us the opportunity to connect with like-minded people who wouldn’t normally be able to engage. Through crowdfunding, we'll be able to gauge interest in in our solar dryer, and understand what’s resonating with people and what’s not. This will show us how to improve the product and modify our pitch to potential investors.  Most importantly, crowdfunding will help as the first step to raise money to fund the social enterprise. 

Furthermore, we'll need partnership in the legal side of setting up the enterprise so that it can run smoothly. This is very important because the legal framework is what ensures that our activities are protected, and most importantly, that we are not operating illegally. 

We would like to partner with nonprofits like Partners in Food Solutions, that is working to strengthen food security, improve nutrition and increase economic development across Africa by expanding and increasing the competitiveness of the food processing sector. We would also like to  work directly with farmers in the field such as Access Agriculture that makes agricultural training videos for farmers in their local languages. We would like to partner with them as disseminators of their training videos to educate rural farmers in simple technologies and strategies to solve common farming problems such as using natural herbs as organic pesticides.

Amba Farmers Voice has applied for a 501c status in Virginia by diaspora members of the Southern Cameroonian community whose families, friends and loved ones have been directly impacted by the conflict in Cameroon. Members are involved in providing humanitarian assistance to some of the most vulnerable populations affected by the conflict in the Cameroons over the past 4 years, supplied relief food stuff, worked to expand education opportunities for thousands of refugee kids.

It is very common in most settings to see refugees as helpless victims. While many are, it is also necessary to see refugees as resilient entrepreneurs, having survived violent conflict, having undertaken arduous journeys through hostile terrains just to arrive at their point of refuge. Given an opportunity, many will thrive. Our approach to training, organizing refugees into cooperatives and providing refugees with our decentralized solar dryers for their produce, and for use for business ventures that they can operate will tease out their creativity, build wealth and ensure that they are self-sufficient and financially independent

 Refugees neither have access to capital nor credit to start business ventures as they don't have collateral. For Southern Cameroonian refugees in Nigeria, the situation is very desperate as the host communities where the majority are located are already very poor. Our approach provides a path to building their capacity, organizing them into cooperatives, setting them up with the dryers, in which they are  equity owners and providing management expertise to support them become self-sufficient and financially independent.

These dryers serve women in rural areas who for the most part are responsible for growing food to feed their families. They are suitable for drying small quantities of food at a time depending on the size of the dryer. Subsistence farmers who produce fruits & vegetables that are abundant in the rainy season often rot for lack of storage facilities. This dryer useful to women farmers raising heifer cows, goats & pigs to dry fresh fodder for feeding the animals in the dry season when there is shortage of fresh grass. These Solar dryers will help solve many of the problems that are associated with sun drying and help farmers get more money for their produce since the quality of the dried produce will be enhanced by the solar dryers, this will in turn have a net effect on their income and the food supply of the nation

We have successfully proven that the concept works, and to date have trained over 109 smallholder farmers. The solar dryer has increased the earnings of mango farmers who are solar drying their fruits and selling them at higher prices at local markets. We aim to use the Innovation for Women Prize to increase the training of women farmers in many rural areas by training over 1000 farmers in the coming year.

We will also use Innovation for Women Prize to help us seek partnerships in cities to supply solar dried fruits and vegetables that we will be sourced from women  farmers.

We have successfully proven that the concept works, and to date have trained over 109 smallholder farmers. The solar dryer has increased the earnings of mango farmers who are solar drying their fruits and selling them at higher prices at local markets. We aim to use the Innovation for Women Prize to increase the training of women farmers in many rural areas by training over 1000 farmers in the coming year.

We will also use Innovation for Women Prize to help us seek partnerships in cities to supply solar dried fruits and vegetables that we will be sourced from women  farmers.

We have trained smallholder farmers in the following communities -XXXXX villages, in the North West Region of Cameroon:

XXXX Village: April 7-21, 2021

Men: 07

Women: 25

Total: 32

XXXXX Village: April 22-30, 2021

Women: 8

Men: 15

Total: 23

XXXXX Village: May 13-23, 2021

Men: 20

Women: 7

Total: 27

XXXXX Village: May 25-June 2, 2021

Men: 12

Women: 15

Total: 27

We have scheduled the following upcoming trainings:

XXXXX - North West Region

XXXXX Central - South West Region Cameroon 

XXXXX - South West Region, Cameroon

XXXXX - South West Region, Cameroon