Did You Know farming is getting easier in Africa

The backbone of Africa, the agricultural sector is often overlooked by policy. Fortunately, there is a lot of important innovation happening around the sector, which will hopefully push African agriculture to a place where it stops relying on food imports from outside of the continent.

SAYeTECH are one of these startups at the forefront of agricultural innovation. We met them in Lausanne, Switzerland, where they were one of a few incredible startups taking part in MassChallenge Switzerland event. Theodore Ohene-Botchway, from Ghana, co-founder of SAYeTECH and his team guest blogged about their innovative company below:

SAYeTECH is a product and service-oriented company that designs and builds smart agricultural machinery suited for the rigorous African condition and use. Through agricultural technology solutions, the company is contributing to food security, job creation, and poverty reduction in Africa. The company provides Computer-Aided Design (CAD) services to local fabricators to enhance their indigenous knowledge in machine fabrication, a tremendous facelift to the local fabrication industry in Ghana and other African countries where foothold has been set. As a young company poised for the African Green Revolution Agenda, SAYeTECH has also developed a multi-purpose thresher with multi-crop functionality. Engineered at a higher efficiency, the thresher is well suited for maize, rice, cowpea, soybean, sorghum, millet, and bambara beans.

The Problem

The high agricultural mechanization deficit in Africa means that a significant number of our farmers resort to manual labor in their farm operations. This situation is more pronounced among the resource-poor smallholder farmers. One critical phase of agricultural production is threshing and farmers are still using rudimentary techniques such as treading on with farm animals with a greater proportion resorting to manual threshing. These techniques often result to high seed damage, low market value for grains, low incomes, high post-harvest loses, inability to cultivate large acreages, low productivity and ultimately poverty. Women and children of school going age are forced into this laborious task during the harvest season as they spend an average 14 schooling days on the field beating grain heads with sticks. This poses a great health implication to the women and children and denies the children some vital classroom hours. They often lag in lessons and some opt to drop out from school, a disheartening experience which leaves them faced with the threat of perpetual poverty.

Our Solution

We have developed a smart multi-crop thresher that mechanically separates the grains from the harvested crop for a variety of crops including; maize, rice, cowpea, soybean, sorghum, millet, and bambara beans. The thresher currently comes with IoT devices that allow for remote tracking of our threshers via the accompanying mobile application. Future updates to the mobile app would help link agro-processors and buyers to grain owners thereby bridging the market gap. This agritech solution helps to reduce post-harvest loses in grains by up to 35% and helps to increase farm income by 50% while providing jobs for the African youth.

Products

In addition to the multi-crop thresher which is our flagship product, SAYeTECH designs and builds, and can provide other products which include but not limited to;

• Grain dryers
• Hammer mills
• Coffee and rice hullers
• Juice extractors
• Feed mixers
• Poultry feed assembly
• Extruders

Winner of Hardware-led Social Innovation by American Society for Mechanical Engineers, ASME ISHOW 2019, Kenya – Nairobi.

Winner of “Innovation of the Year” at the 2019 AB Afrikpreneur Awards, Cameroon.

Editor – Thank you to Theodore for his write up explaining SAYeTech’s excellent innovation that can change the time and effort taken up farming. If you want to connect with SAYeTECH you can do so via Email, through their website, on Twitter or Linkedin

If you want to feature on Inventive Africa, please reach out to us on InventiveAfrica1@gmail.com, or on Twitter, and let us know. We are always looking to showcase innovative ideas from across the continent.