Cherehani Agriculture – FUGA Technology

The Elevate Prize not only provides access to financial resources, but also a great opportunity to connect with an ecosystem of mentors and like-minded individuals that we can engage with and learn from, new ways to develop our product and our business model to achieve a broader impact.

The Elevate Prize Funding will enable us to put technology in the hands of disenfranchised smallholder farmers to equip them with quality veterinary services, quality and affordable health and nutrition products and access to localized and relatable information on disease outbreaks, vaccinations and best modern farming practices. This information and services accessible from both a feature phone and smartphone will enable us to reach the most remote of farmers to ensure that no one is left behind.

The fund will cover training costs (staff and extension officers), marketing costs, transport, medicine storage boxes, procurement drenching and spraying medicines and to advance our digital infrastructure to enable us to quickly scale and offer our services regionally.  

As a Lead Software Engineer of a Micro Finance Institution in Kenya, I developed a robust digital infrastructure, that has expanded to reach over 18000 women micro entrepreneurs in rural Kenya and has been critical to the organization for maintaining low operation expenses and optimizing operations to enable the team focus on creating value for underserved communities in rural Kenya.

I developed skills of listening keenly to customers needs and designing tech products that suit them as well as building a strong team that can efficiently deliver on set targets.

My passion is to use technology to provide innovative and scalable solutions that will enable underserved rural households to break out of poverty and hunger.

At Cherehani Agriculture, through Fuga Technology, our vision is to increase productivity of smallholder farmers in Africa through smart distribution of inputs.

Our goal is to reduce the cost of inputs by upto 40% for small holder farmers, allowing them to invest in productive farming tools and basic household needs that will improve household living standards and better prepare them to deal with economic shocks.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, livestock contributes to the livelihoods of about 1.7 Billion poor people, and 70% of those employed in the sector are women. The disintegrated supply chain from Manufacturer to the local agrovet shops results to unreliable and increased prices of inputs; contributing to losses of more than $30B annually in Sub-Saharan Africa for livestock farmers.

The growing demand for livestock products presents an opportunity to increase incomes for farmers and people working in the sector.

Cherehani Agriculture distributes livestock drenching and tick spraying products to small holder farmers in rural areas of Kenya via a network of extension service providers who use a propriety technology (FUGA) to manage farm visits. Fuga Technology is an app and web-based platform that aggregates demand, sources directly from manufacturers and leverages digitized last mile infrastructure for timely and affordable delivery of inputs. Veterinary officers use a downloadable android app to capture farm data, schedule farm visits and record interventions.

We leverage the data collected during farm visits to provide content on best practice in animal production, and to build credit scores that are used for asset financing of farm tools and livestock.

Currently farmers depend on a disintegrated and long supply chain for inputs, this is expensive and unreliable. Veterinary officers use exercise books to document appointments and intervention history.

At Fuga we integrate the whole livestock health and nutrition ecosystem for timely interventions and increased productivity.

For farmers:

a.     Fuga distribution centers cut out layers of intermediaries lowering the cost of quality inputs by about 40%.

b.     Fuga mobile wallet allows a convenient mobile based tool for farmers to safely save small amounts over time and this significantly increases the chances of timely administration of health and nutrition interventions.

c.     We provide localized and relatable text messages to farmers in their preferred language on best modern farming practices, vaccinations and disease outbreaks.

For Veterinary Service Providers:

a.     Fuga App empowers vets to increase their income by enabling them to structure their network of farmers and increase farm visits.

b.     Fuga provides vets with an additional source of income through commissions earned from the sale of inputs to farmers within their networks. The funds are transparently available in the vets wallet for withdrawal anytime they need the funds.

·      By ensuring reliable distribution of quality inputs and making the costs affordable to farmers, while providing them with information about disease outbreaks, upcoming vaccinations and farm management tips, we will increase productivity by up to 40%to small holder farmers who are onboarded to our platform within the first year.

·      Veterinary officers who use our App have reported over 60%increase in their monthly income within the first two months. By replacing the use of inefficient data capturing methods like using exercise books, with the app to structure farmers network, the vets hardly miss routine farm visit.

·      Livestock feature as savings that can be converted into cash whenever the household needs it. It's a security asset influencing access to informal credit and can also be used as collateral for loans. Livestock in good health attract better prices making this form of saving attractive for small- holder farmers.

·      Agriculture contributes to 24%of green house emissions. Livestock contributes about 14.5% of this. Best practices and technologies in animal feeding, health and husbandry and manure management could cut emissions by as much as30%. At Fuga we work with our farmers to adopt best practices and technologies to reduce green house emissions

Our goal is to increase productivity of smallholder farmers in Africa through distribution of inputs. 

We started the development of Fuga in June 2020. 

So far we serve 500 Farmers across rural Kenya with at least 1500 cattle (Average of 3 cattle per farmer)

In the next 12 months, we aim to reach 6000 farmers in rural Kenya and 18,000 cattle. With the Elevate Prize, we will be able to reach an additional 15000 farmers and 45000 cattle. 

The impact we are expecting is to reduce the cost of drenching and spraying medicines by upto 40% for smallholder farmers in our distribution channel. For an individual farmer, the savings made will be invested in productive farming tools and basic household needs that will improve household living standards. 

Here's what we will focus on the next 24 months:

1. The Fuga App has been built with users throughout the whole journey and as a result we have built a simple application that vets can download and use on the go. We will expand to Uganda in 2022.

2. We are currently building off line data capture capabilities on the Fuga App so that vets in remote areas can capture farmers details and upload them to our servers once they get to areas with better connectivity.

3. User Growth - we project to reach over 200K farmers and 4000 veterinary service providers.

4. We will recruit for roles in Distribution, Software Development, Partnerships, Extension Leads as well as Finance.

5. We target to partner with over 50manufacturers.The product partners will ensure our customers have access to quality and affordable inputs. We'll also partner with over 2000distribution agents from whose premises our customers will collect inputs.

Financial barriers: The upfront cost of administering drenching and spraying medicine is high for smallholder farmers who have other basic needs competing for their minimal resources. 

Technical / Cultural Barriers: Most smallholder farmers have limited literacy and do not keep proper records about drenching and spraying schedules - they only seek medical intervention when the animal shows visible symptoms. The unplanned last minute intervention is costly; it leads to death of the livestock and impoverishment of smallholder farmers. We have developed a proprietary SMS messaging platform to send content on best practises in animal production and management to the farmers with the aim of improving their productivity and income. 

Cyber security: due to our data and technology infrastructure being online, it may be susceptible to cyber attacks. To safeguard our system and customer data, we have implemented the following checks - our technology is hosted in world's top secured platform like Microsoft Azure and Linode, our application is coded in a modular form to ensure that the entire system is not affected in case there is an attack, and it can easily be detected, we invest in performing regular security checks on the system to seal of any weak points.

Technology has transformed all vital economic sectors in developing countries yet Agriculture which is at the core lags behind. Fuga is changing that for the livestock sector. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations over 1.7 Billion poor people in the developing world depend on livestock for their livelihoods. More than 70% of those employed in the sector are women.

Our goal is to put technology in the hands of disenfranchised smallholder farmers to equip them with quality veterinary services, quality and affordable health and nutrition products and access to localized and relatable information on disease outbreaks, vaccinations and best modern farming practices. This information and services accessible from both a feature phone and smartphone enables us to reach the most remote of farmers to ensure that no one is left behind.

Fuga has created a strong diversity and inclusion strategy to enable us attract good talent and drive innovative results. To ensure all stakeholders in our journey have equal opportunity, we have taken the following steps:

Gender equality - half of our founding team and the leadership team is composed of women.

Youth involvement - 70% of our team is composed of youth under the age of 30 years

FUGA’s leadership team has a deep understanding of the communities we work in. Our 20+years of combined experience has enabled us to build our products with the customer in mind. 

Being part of building the Cherehani Africa (MFI) model in the rural parts of Western Kenya, that has grown to reach over 18,000 micro-entrepreneurs in rural Kenya, sin 2015,  has given the leadership team deep insights of how to listen to the challenges of farmers in the rural areas, how to build products with and for them, and how to keep reinventing our solutions to keep up with their evolving needs. 

Cherehani Africa, an MFI has also given the leadership team opportunities to be part of a global ecosystem committed to poverty eradication, and empowerment of the world’s most vulnerable groups. 

We currently have a team of Eight (8) working full-time and one (1) team member working part- time on Fuga. 

By being a digitally-led organization,  Fuga can rapidly expand geographically with a much smaller labor requirement, integrate with other API-based systems to access a larger potential customer base, and leverage other digital platforms (e.g. social media) to cost effectively conduct marketing, engagement, and promotional activities

During the pilot stage of our digital platform we had a malware attack on the platform that resulted in veterinary officers being locked out of their applications for two days. The timing could not be worse since this was a phase of user acquisition and drop offs were very high at this stage. I immediately updated the entire team of the attack and brought onboard external consultants to help with managing the attack. We were able to recover the system and build back our trust with users. This disruption allowed us to take our security issues very seriously from the early stages of building our platform - we have put in place safeguards to prevent such attacks.

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The Elevate prize will enable us to continue to invest in cost cutting technology to increase our efficiency, reach at least 15,000 more underserved  smallholder farmers, as well as expand geographically. 

We will seek to cover the following costs:

• Advance our digital platform

• Staff and Extension officers training

• Marketing activities

• Transport

• Medicine storage boxes

• Smartphones and Ipads for field officers

• Procurement of drenching and spraying medicines

1. Cherehani Africa MFI is the first financing partner to Cherehani Agriculture (FUGA) target audience, up to the point where its portfolio will be stretched, hence the need to partner with other financing players as well.

2. D-Prize: is the first grant funder for FUGA’s Pilot