Amini

Smallholder farmers in Africa, up to 80% of whom are women, produce an estimated 70% of the continent’s food yet face exclusion from regional and global markets due to a simple digital divide which exacerbates data inequality and food insecurity. Unlike larger farms, smallholder farmers and the cooperatives that represent them often lack data-driven insights into weather, drought, pest, and flood patterns; technology solutions that exist today are either not tailored to small-scale farming in Africa, or do not provide a financially and technologically accessible platform for smallholder farmers to access this crucial information. This poses an enormous problem as extreme weather events are one of the leading causes of hunger in Africa. Furthermore, market regulations such as the upcoming EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), while intended to mitigate climate change, are set to exclude many smallholder farmers who are not able to use the smartphones and geolocation required to be compliant. As a result, smallholder farmers experience increasing exclusion from the market, difficulty predicting and recovering from severe weather events, and increased operational costs and inefficiencies. The problem particularly affects women farmers, who, as a result of intersectional discrimination, often have access to land only through male family members and not in their own right, leading to compounded resource accessibility and financial challenges. Equal resource access is estimated to have the potential to boost women farmers’ yields by 20-30% and reduce hunger for up to 150 million people, but women are blocked from those resources and data more so than their male counterparts. The data scarcity issue becomes exacerbated at the regional and continental scales, leading to overinflated insurance costs, food loss, financial setbacks, and vulnerability to the effects of climate change–ultimately aggravating the continent’s risk of hunger or famine. With one in five individuals in Africa being a farmer, smallholder farmers are not only endemic to Africa’s agricultural heritage, but are also critical parts of their communities; therefore, their lack of data puts generational livelihoods, lives, communities, and economies at risk–and is poised to be exacerbated by the compounding effects of the climate crisis.

Amini’s solution provides unprecedented hyper-accurate and granular data that can be localized to individual smallholder farms (as small as 10M by 10M) for a level of precision and detail that was previously unimaginable. The solution is purpose-built for the African context, democratizing data access on a continent that until now faces extreme data scarcity. The availability of this data not only improves farmers’ individual crop yield and recovery in case of weather- or pest-related setbacks, but also contributes to an information ecosystem that facilitates smallholder farmers’ productivity, inclusion in the global market, and access to financial resources like agricultural insurance.

Amini works via local institutions (incl. local government units, cooperatives, agriculture companies) and global companies (incl. food and beverage companies, insurance companies) with direct access to smallholder farmers to improve those farmers’ access to high-quality data, compliance with EUDR, and production efficiency–thereby improving climate resilience and disaster recovery, increasing crop yield, limiting food loss and hunger, improving local economies, and reducing inequality (climate-related and otherwise). Amini utilizes AI, space technology, and machine learning to localize data infrastructure for the African context in real-time. Amini’s solution translates complex soil, irrigation, and weather data into simple SMS and USSD messages that are sent to smallholder farmers’ cell phones (importantly, smartphones are not necessary to access Amini’s services) to inform them of precipitation, soil, or other agriculturally relevant conditions. The solution revolutionizes data collection by developing a constellation of Internet of Things (IoT)-integrated nano-satellites that improves terrestrial data collection methods that are traditionally extremely costly and time-consuming. By helping to register and geolocate smallholder farmers, including women who are traditionally left out, and remotely check required boxes for regulatory compliance (which is unavailable to many smallholder farmers due to the digital divide), Amini reduces food loss, provides insights for sustainable resource management, and helps communities become more resilient to the effects of climate change. Importantly, Amini works with and within already established entities and farming cooperatives in the contexts in which it is applied–in this way, building the local knowledge base among smallholder farmers and their communities, diversifying applications of the technology, and thereby providing a sustainable platform to mitigate the effects of food insecurity brought on by climate change. In short, Amini supports the biggest producers of Africa’s food to mitigate one of the biggest causes of hunger on the African continent.

A product demo video may be found here.

Amini’s solution serves the 33 million smallholder farmers across Africa, as well as the more than 1 billion individuals, communities, economies, and organizations that they feed. Currently, these farmers lack the resources and organizational structures that allow medium- and large-scale farms to easily comply with market regulations, access data around efficient resource use, pest management, and weather patterns, and recover quickly in the event of a pest- or weather-related event. Despite producing the most food for Africa, smallholder farmers are overlooked by big food and beverage companies and international regulatory bodies. With greater access to the data and information that will make their farms compliant, successful, and efficient, smallholder farmers in Africa are poised to better serve their communities, participate in local and regional economies, and be at the forefront of sustainable, inclusive, and climate-resilient agriculture. On an individual level, smallholder farmers, especially women who depending on the country represent up to 80% of them, will be less susceptible to avoidable crop yield setbacks, more able to comply with regulations that provide market opportunities and insurance resources, and ultimately more able to navigate a changing climate. Amini’s solution therefore not only increases food security for farmers and their communities, but will strengthen local economies to be likewise adaptable to the effects of climate change on agriculture.

Team Lead and Amini Founder/CEO Kate Kallot and the entire Amini team are united by their vision of building a purpose-built, inclusive solution to Africa’s data scarcity crisis, thereby alleviating hunger and building climate resilience. Underpinning the unparalleled technical expertise of the Amini team is their shared commitment to environmental protection, sustainability, and human prospering. Many of the team are part of generational farming or pastoral families, or are farmers themselves. They come from Africa, India, and Latin America, and the team is almost equal in men and women, with 50% of women in leadership roles; through their personal histories, they have seen firsthand the technical skills and challenges of smallholder farming. Founder Kate was personally inspired by her family’s background in the Central African Republic, and her current home in Kenya, to develop a solution that would encourage the entire continent’s economic development while helping everyday individuals like her family. By uniting their lived experiences with the technological expertise gained from working with some of the biggest tech companies in the world, the Amini team is building sustainability for their own communities and countless others across the continent.

Amini’s personal and technological commitment drives their solution and fortifies their commitment to each and every community, cooperative, and individual farmer. In order to ensure a complete understanding of the challenges faced by smallholder farmers, Amini has conducted several pilot studies with key informant interviews and regularly interacts with the farming cooperatives who are most familiar with smallholder farmers’ opportunities and challenges. Amini, in collaboration with existing partners, is also in the process of developing a simple text-based two-way communication system to improve the solution based on farmers’ changing needs and contexts. Amini’s solution is African from conceptualization to execution, and will remain so throughout its evolution.

Amini's solution was piloted in 2023 with Aon, the world’s largest agriculture insurance broker, to predict crop yield for maize farmers. The flagship program under this agreement leverages Amini data and up to $1B in premiums to drive the transition to regenerative agriculture for 10 million farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa. Amini’s partnership with the Agro-Insurance Consortium of Uganda, a consortium of 13 insurers, covers over 7 million farmers and provides insurance premium subsidies of up to 80% to small-scale farmers in disaster-prone areas. Amini data reduced the cost of insurance by 30% for maize farmers in the program, enabling wider access to the subsidized cover that initially included 300,000 farmers. Currently, Amini also works with companies and financial institutions doing business in Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Ivory Coast to improve crop yield, manage resources, and reduce food loss. Since the solution’s inception, Amini has provided data for 250,000 smallholder farmers through regional banks, insurers, and microfinance organizations, as well as various companies doing business directly in the African context. In 2023, Amini closed a $4 Million USD seed round led by Salesforce Ventures and the Female Founders Fund; Amini is also backed by Climate-tech VC Satgana and other investors, such as Pale Blue Dot and Superorganism, who had previously backed Amini in its $2 million USD pre-seed round. In Africa, Amini currently operates in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Ghana, and Ivory Coast; market explorations are currently being conducted elsewhere in Africa and the Caribbean, as part of Amini’s continued growth on a global scale. As Amini’s market expands, and the communities with which it works become more diverse, its technology will continue to adapt to fit the precise purpose and scale of each context.

Amini is applying to Solve with the goal of expanding its client base and scaling up its delivery to other regions and contexts, including those that are more difficult to penetrate due to ongoing political unrest or conflict. While Amini has developed a client roster of 10+ companies, cooperatives, and organizations–representing up to 8 million smallholder farmers–some of the market areas with the most potential to improve data accessibility and have a positive climate impact are also the most challenging to reach due to political blockages or other market complications. Secondarily, Amini is in the process of developing a monitoring and evaluation framework, defining indicators, and more efficiently measuring its solution’s impact (including the two-way communications system mentioned above); in this regard, Amini seeks to gain support from other applicants and experts to integrate M&E practices into every aspect of its technology and customer/project life cycle. Above all, the opportunity to be a part of the MIT community, building partnerships with academics, experts, and fellow innovators, will be invaluable for Amini’s continued growth and success. 

Amini’s solution utilizes existing technologies in unprecedented ways, developing purpose-built, accessible solutions exclusively for the African context. Data scarcity is an increasingly dire problem in Africa, affecting local and regional economies, hindering farming communities’ resource efficiencies and supply chains, hampering policy-making around the climate crisis, and increasing the number of people who go hungry. While some technologies exist to provide data for agricultural purposes, they are not sufficiently advanced, nor designed, to account for the way most farming is done in Africa – on extremely small plots of land by families, and particularly women, with gendered tasks; furthermore, such technologies are financially and digitally inaccessible to the majority of such small-scale farmers. The traditional way of doing remote sensing and earth observation tends to not be accurate due to the spatial resolution limitations of satellite imagery. In addition, tree crops, like cocoa, and farms that are practicing regenerative agriculture (i.e., the use of trees for cover cropping) become challenging to monitor only with data from the sky. The data needs to be tuned and calibrated with data from the ground–which is where Amini’s solution is groundbreaking. Amini’s approach uses a combination of various open-source land- and space-based sensors (from NASA and the European Space Agency, among others), as well as the company’s own constellation of nano-satellites (coming soon), to aggregate and analyze data in unprecedented ways using machine learning and AI to gather data appropriate for both the uniqueness and scale of the African continent.

Amini’s technology is also revolutionary due to its democratized approach that offers services at various price points to fit varying purchasing powers, charging the smallholder farmers nothing while having an enormous impact at the hyperlocal (smallholder farmers data) and global levels (climate resilience and food security). Amini’s solution is the first built within and for Africa–and has the potential to not only solve Africa’s data scarcity crisis, but also ensure smallholder farmers’ presence in the global food market and ensure no community goes hungry even in the face of climate-related changes.

Amini is currently in the process of developing a Theory of Change with a third-party expert; however, Amini’s impact in the past year and a half is self-evident. Due to Amini’s pilot project in Uganda, for example, insurance costs were reduced by 30%, thus increasing smallholder farmers’ access to such protections, and other financial services such as loans. While the longer term outcomes of this are yet to be determined, it is expected that with more financial protections, smallholder farmers will be better able to recover from weather- or pest-related events, improve their regenerative agriculture practices, and reduce inefficiencies, thereby providing steady production with limited waste.

Among Amini’s other services is the direct provision of critical data to individual smallholder farmers; in one example, in 2023, Amini worked with Maize-farmer Martin in Nyeri, Kenya, who realized that his yield had been steadily decreasing, especially in a particular section of his farm; without sufficient data on the soil, precipitation, and pest conditions of his farm, compounded by changing weather patterns due to climate change, he had to rely on trial and error to try and mitigate the situation–each time, continuing to produce less than expected and losing profits. With Amini’s services, Martin was able to get information to better predict precipitation patterns, for example, and was able to improve the shade cover of the underperforming part of his farm to improve the farm’s overall productivity.

Most recently, Amini has worked with farming cooperatives to ensure smallholder farmers are EUDR-compliant and are able to meet production targets without food loss. In supporting these farms with the scientific data and insights that are usually afforded to large-scale farms and companies, Amini expects its largest-scale outcome to be community-level adaptive resilience to the effects of climate change, including a more sustainable economy.

Amini is developing a new M&E framework and set of indicators in collaboration with external consultants, which are expected to be finalized by the end of May or early June 2024. In the meantime, Amini’s impact goals include increased food security, resilience to climate change, greater gender equality, and more sustainable agriculture practices. So far, Amini has measured its impact qualitatively through informal interviews with smallholder farmer-beneficiaries, quantitatively through reductions in farming insurance prices (such as the 30% reduction achieved through its collaboration with Aon), as well as the breadth and depth of data that is available to be tailored and further updated based on different contextual applications. As of 2023, this figure stands at 2.3M hectares across East Africa. In the next 3 years, Amini targets the following outputs: 1. Land - Amini’s data will be used in the rehabilitation of 1M hectares of cocoa fields in Ghana and Ivory Coast, supporting 300,000 farmers and increasing current adoption rates of Good Agricultural Practices from 30% to over 50%. In East Africa, a further 600,000 hectares of coffee lands will be restored. 2. Water - Amini will also continue to support climate smart irrigation by combining ground water data with soil moisture and surface water data to reduce water waste. 3. Biodiversity - Over the next 3 years, Amini will support the transition to intercropping and agroforestry on 3M hectares of land.

Finally, Amini’s steady expansion across the continent and into other emerging markets such as Latin America and the Caribbean evidences the immediate applicability of the existing technology, as well as the solution’s adaptability to a variety of beneficiaries and contexts.

Amini has developed a holistic data platform that ingests satellite imagery, weather data, and ground sensor data, then by applying proprietary AI/machine learning models, generates actionable insights on crop health, soil moisture, and weather patterns down to the level of the smallest farm. Amini’s platform consists of five main components: Ingestion engine and data catalog; Geopackage; Models and analytics; Co-pilot for insights and recommendation generation; Web application as a frontend. The Amini Ingestion Engine collects, transforms, and fuses raw data coming from satellite imagery, raster data, drones, IoT sensors, soil sample analyses, field surveys, and other user-inputted datasets, such as historical crop yield data or relevant shapefiles and maps. Amini’s proprietary method of performing multitemporal and multispectral data fusion for satellite imagery through the use of algorithms and the Amini Earth Science Foundation Model fuses all bands together into a single representation. Amini then partners with various ground truth data providers, universities, research institutions, soil sampling laboratories, government agencies, NGOs, and nature financial institutions to collate and process various datasets to make them available in one catalog. The information is available on Amini’s platform and distributed to individual smallholder farmers via text or USSD messaging.

Amini’s proprietary AI and machine learning technology builds upon existing satellite and space technologies, applying its proprietary algorithms for multitemporal and multispectral data fusion for satellite imagery to process a variety of open-source datasets, fill data gaps, and process it for easy translation to beneficiaries. Moreover, Amini is launching Africa’s first constellation of GPU-accelerated NVIDIA nano-satellites which will work together to provide an unprecedented level of granularity of environmental data across the continent. A white paper exploring Amini’s tech and evidencing its functionality is in progress and expected to be available in the next three months.

21 full-time; 0 part-time; 2 contractors

More than 1.5 years

Amini’s approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion is built into every aspect of its vision, technology, team, and business model. Amini first came together as a team to develop a solution that would benefit communities like their own–farmers, farmworkers, and the families who depend on them. Amini’s full-time team is composed of individuals from 8 countries (5 of which are African), with a diversity of educational backgrounds and traditional and non-traditional credentials; Amini hires the best individuals for the job, celebrating their lived experiences and talents, and those who naturally align with the solution’s approach. Additionally, the Amini team is split at almost exactly 50/50 women to men, with a Board that is 100% women. This makes Amini’s team more united, stronger, and more able to deliver its solution.

Amini’s commitment to DE&I is present down to its business model; Amini’s business model takes into account different entities’ purchasing power, whether farming cooperatives or multinational companies, and will never charge smallholder farmers for the data provided. In this way, smallholder farmers, including the many women farmers, are able to continue to represent their communities in the regional and global market, restoring the balance of power between big agriculture, overseas markets, and smallholder farms. Finally, climate change has been shown to affect women more than men, so Amini’s approach to benefit women smallholder farmers (who make up 60-80% of smallholder farmers) is also a core component of its DE&I ethos. From conceptualization to execution, Amini’s approach is built inextricably into a DE&I framework that will not be compromised.

Amini’s business model revolves around providing access to data through a platform or web app in user-friendly formats. Environmental data is sold to various customers and organizations through different subscription models, catering to their purchasing power and specific needs. For instance, food and beverage companies, facing heightened regulatory pressure to disclose information about their first-mile supply chain, often opt for a premium "license" with Amini, granting access to specific, detailed insights and the platform. On the other hand, customer segments with different data requirements and lower purchasing power, such as regional banks or microfinance institutions like Ecobank, opt for either an annual subscription or a pay-as-you-go monthly plan. A more recent component of Amini’s business plan is for larger partnerships, usually with state governments, which implicates a customizable pricing model based on the services provided. Having recently signed its first contract with a state government, Amini’s multi-tiered, sustainable model is anticipated to persist over the next five years, with ongoing testing and refinement for the next two to three years.

Important to note is only when Amini engages with paying corporate customers do cooperatives or NGOs also become partners, and by extension the smallholder farmers. In this framework, no charges are imposed on the smallholder farmers, even while they are the direct recipients of much of the data and services provided. This contrasts with other business models that exploit farmers for regulatory compliance. Despite the well-intentioned efforts of EUDR, it inadvertently creates friction for African smallholder farmers. Amini’s business model intends to upend these sources of power imbalance, fill the data gaps for local farmers and larger companies, and remain able to provide climate resilience to entities for decades to come.

Following its highly successful pre-seed and seed rounds in 2023, Amini is already proving its financial sustainability, with a large full-time team, diverse public- and private-sector customers, and sufficient runway for the next 2 years. As mentioned above, the current 5-year model is rapidly proving its endurance, even while the next 2-3 years will include frequent re-evaluations and monitoring to ensure the model is working as intended and adapting as needed. By working closely with cooperatives, local financial institutions, and global businesses via subscription models that cater to each entity’s data needs and purchasing power, Amini provides a solution for data scarcity that is not possible or sustainable via other services. Not only is Amini’s technology purpose-built for the African agricultural context, it also democratizes the data while scaling the cost to purchasing power.