Smart agricultural machinery has historically been reserved for large-scale farm operations that can afford the hefty prices of such equipment.
But Jeffrey Boakye Appiagyei and Theodore Ohene-Botchway (Co-Founders at Ghana-based SAYeTECH) have taken a different approach to farm mechanisation by providing smallholder farmers with affordable and user-friendly technology that enhances productivity and profitability.
Their innovations address specific pain points in African agriculture, such as:
- Low mechanisation rates
- High post-harvest losses
- Labour-intensive processes
SAYeTECH combines hardware and Internet of Things (IoT) embedded systems to build tools specific to Africa’s smallholder farming communities. This includes a cocoa pod breaking machine, a cereal dryer and a multi-crop thresher. The multipurpose threshers, for example, efficiently process grains like maize, rice, sorghum, and millet, significantly reducing post-harvest losses and labour costs, as well as encouraging resource efficiency.
For the SAYeTECH team, the goal is not just to address the usual list of labour issues (such as productivity), but also to provide jobs for young adults. and keep children – who would normally be pulled out of school to help with the harvest – in the classroom
The company raised a $100,000 seed round led by AgFunder this year.