Afri-Tech: Championing Organic, Highly Productive Agriculture

For the first time I thought about this idea was a time I visited to somewhere and I have seen our agricultural farms are not good, not modern farms and are less productive, then I asked myself why our agricultural productions are not good and why we are also dependent to Ethiopia.

Then I started to search an information from the YouTube, I realized that I can learn the knowledge being used for the rest of the world and looked for many researchers on Agriculture. Later on, I started to work in my home. For example, I began to transform each tree with multi stems to observe more water from the sand since our country does not have much rain. This will also support the tree to produce more crops.

After I got the idea and also knew many existing loopholes in our country, I asked myself where to I can get investment, you know in our country, banks want to fulfil many conditions. I saw Harhub on Facebook, I applied and I was one of 322 applicants. First, before the investment we were trained many things like how we can go to the market, how to gain customers.

We were trained many areas of gaps and the training opened eyes for us for the market and helped us a lot. After the training, we received investment from Harhub and we established this farm.

What we are different from the existing farmers is that we produce organic fertilizers which was not used before in our country. We make these fertilizers from the plant residues, sand dust, chicken manure and others, we added many organics. This allows us to stop importing chemicals from abroad.

We received $4,000 of diminishing Musharakah investment or Equity from Harhub. The amount of money I received was not enough to establish my business. Once again, Harhub gave me an opportunity to use Tarmiye Crowdfunding platform to fundraise and I collected another $4000 and we establish Afri-Tech firm to a total of $8,000.

We employed 4 job seekers, 3 are from the local residents those also contribute the village and other one more person for marketing who is aware of the market prices and knows each days prices.

One of the main challenges we have been facing for a long time was the transportation cost which was very high. When the crops are ready in the farm, in order to take the market to sell, we couldn’t able to make delivery to the areas our production been requested and we needed to get our own car so we can delivery our productions easily to anywhere our products being requested. We solved that challenge by using the investment to buy vehicle.

Our recently plans are to use technology and make operations to some of the trees we cultivate like the Papay trees which previously contained to only one stem but now we will modify it into a tree with 3 or 4 stems and more branches to produce more crops than the previous ones.

I would like to advice to the youth who are the graduates, you have to believe in your country and no to be afraid of to showcase your business ideas, don’t allow your ideas to die in your brains, you can go up to the stairs from the first one.