MIT Solve

Solution Overview

Solution Name:

Tech Adopter

One-line solution summary:

Small sized manual agricultural machines to help farmers reduce labor-hardships

Pitch your solution.

Rural farmers in Rwanda are facing labor hardships because they are still using traditional farming methods which has many negative drawbacks such as nonstandard farming, imprecision seeding and many other due to the lack of agricultural machines which are expensive to access.

As Tech Adopter team, we came-up with an idea of helping medium farmers have access to modern agriculture by providing them small manual grain seeding machine and Rice planting machines. The fact of being manual is to reduced cost of operators, fuel and high maintenance costs and fact gives right to anyone to become an operator.

By using our machines, this will totally reduce the farmer's hardships and improve the farming standards as the machines use precision farming (regulated) which will lead to the improved harvest.

What specific problem are you solving?

In Rwanda, Agriculture employs 80% of total population and contribute only 33% to the GDP. Most agricultural activities are carried out in rural area and big percentage of rural people survive from agriculture activities.

compared to the big number of people (80% of population) engaged in agriculture the contribution (33%) to GDP is less. This is because:

1) Farmers do non-precision farming and the randomly seeds

2) Farmers do nonstandard farming and they don't care about line spacing, seed width and other standards

This leads to high input expenses and promote labor hardships but also at the end giving less produces as the statistics shows.

Therefore having no access to affordable standardized agricultural machines promotes traditional agriculture which has many negative drawbacks.

What is your solution?

We do the manufacturing of small sized manual agricultural machines to help cooperatives and middle farmers have access to standardized agricultural machines at affordable price.

Taking an example to rice planting machine, farmers use traditional method of using they hands and plant them in water which is time taking where they do it randomly without any standards.

Therefore, Manual rice planting machine simplify work where rice planting is done by rice planter machine respecting distances between seeds and line spacing standards.

Being manual, makes it affordable, easy to use and environmental friendly since it doesn't produce smoke.

Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Our primarily users are middle farmers and cooperatives in Rwanda who are around 9 millions still using traditional farming methods. Our products helps them do modernized agriculture in a simple easy affordable way.

We have started a piloting phase to see the feedback from farmers in order to come up with the best suitable solution to our targeted population.

The technology behind our products are made simple to allow easy use of our products in regards to standards.

Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Support small-scale producers with access to inputs, capital, and knowledge to improve yields while sustaining productivity of land and seas

In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?

Kigali, Rwanda

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Concept: An idea being explored for its feasibility to build a product, service, or business model based on that idea

Who is the primary delegate for your solution?

CEO Israel NIYONSHUTI