Isaac Sesi holding the GrainMate moisture meter in Accra, Ghana. Picture by: Richard Akakpo
By Sefakor Fekpe, fowl story company
Sesi Applied sciences, an agricultural know-how agency, focuses on creating cost-effective, technology-driven options for farmers. The corporate’s flagship product, the GrainMate, is a grain moisture meter designed to assist these dealing with grains effortlessly gauge the moisture content material, thereby minimising post-harvest losses.
Isaac Sesi picks up a small bucket of maize to display the most recent iteration of his moisture-measuring system. After powering the system with batteries, he presses a button, citing a white display that shows numerous grain choices for testing. He chooses the maize class and presses one other button to provoke the studying. Sesi is demonstrating the newest mannequin of the GrainMate moisture meter, a tool he developed to fight meals loss in rural farming communities.
“Moisture content material is without doubt one of the bodily portions which might be important in figuring out the standard of your finish product, so we have now provide you with the GrainMate to make it straightforward to know the way a lot moisture content material you might have in your product,” Sesi explains.
As a younger man from a farming neighborhood within the Ashanti area of Ghana, Sesi turned accustomed to the challenges of storing grain the arduous manner, witnessing the difficulties his dad and mom and different farmers skilled when making an attempt to retailer their farm produce. He devoted his tutorial profession to discovering an answer to this meals loss.
His first iteration of the system was accomplished in 2018. The concept was to assist farmers, aggregators, feed producers and anybody within the grain worth chain to simply measure moisture content material of their grain earlier than storage, feed preparation or processing.
“One facet of meals safety is within the strategy of with the ability to cut back or mitigate post-harvest losses as a result of 30% of the meals that we produce is misplaced … If we will lower down on these losses, that can bode properly for our meals safety as a result of the meals that’s being misplaced is meals that may feed different individuals,” Sesi says.
Presently, Sesi Applied sciences’ GrainMate is inexpensive in comparison with different, imported, moisture meter manufacturers.
Sesi’s firm presents two fashions. One is for normal grains, which is offered at 800 Ghanaian cedis (about US$65) whereas a second mannequin extends to high-value commodities similar to shea nuts. That model prices 1,000 Ghanaian cedis (about US$83).
Sesi graduated from Kwame Nkrumah College of Science and Know-how (KNUST) and used his remaining yr analysis mission to provide you with the GrainMate.
“In Ghana, with analysis, you simply end and put it on the shelf so you progress on together with your life however we thought that we developed one thing fairly good so we needed to make it useful to farmers so I began Sesi Applied sciences to commercialise the output of my analysis at KNUST,” Sesi says.
The corporate’s breakthrough got here with a sale of 150 of the units. “Sesi Applied sciences was initially financed by way of a big pre-order by a global non-profit. This gave us the funds we wanted to supply our first 150 models and rent our first worker,” the entrepreneur mentioned in a earlier interview.
Since then, Sesi has relied on income from gross sales of moisture meters and different companies, whereas his firm has acquired funding from a variety of sources.
“We began with no cash, completely no cash. We simply began by making an attempt to commercialise this know-how. How we had been in a position to manufacture our first batch was that we acquired some pre-orders so we requested the shopper to pay for 70% in order that we might use it to finance the preliminary stock,” he says.
Decided to succeed in as many farmers as attainable, Sesi participated in numerous start-up help programmes. He emerged as the general winner of the GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize, an award for African agri-food innovators and entrepreneurs who’re growing options for the agriculture worth chain, in 2019.
“We received the general US$50,000 prize.”
This prize helped him to scale each manufacturing and human assets.
“Now we have about 25 individuals in our staff and that tells you that our wage invoice each month is substantial and we’re making progress. We even have our area staff who’re in control of offering companies that we offer to farmers,” he explains.
Over 5,000 farmers have now tried out the system, though uptake has been slower than Sesi and his younger staff anticipated. “There’s very sluggish adoption to new know-how and so we have now not seen the form of speedy adoption that we’re .”
Nonetheless, suggestions from the present pool of customers retains Sesi and his staff motivated.
“As an example, poultry farmers use our system to examine the moisture content material of the completely different parts of the feed earlier than they put it collectively. After they do this they inform us that after they know the moisture content material they see the standard of the feed is excessive, productiveness is excessive and their birds don’t endure from ailments as a result of our system helps them.”
In an earlier interview with How we made it in Africa, Sesi mentioned his greatest mistake was underestimating how lengthy it might take to construct the product. “We had been new to constructing business {hardware} merchandise and we didn’t anticipate all of the challenges we’d face alongside the way in which. This led to us overpromising our greatest buyer who had made an enormous guess on us. It virtually brought on our downfall. Now we all know higher.”
Sesi is optimistic about development and is eyeing an area manufacturing facility using expert engineers to extend manufacturing capability and push mass adoption of the GrainMate system.
“Ultimately, the purpose is to have the ability to produce and assemble extra,” he says.
/fowl story company
