Eggpreneur- (Tapona Foundation)

As a winner, its for Eggpreneur but a BIG Win for all women and youth in five countries (Kenya, Uganda, India, Tanzania, and Indonesia) where we operate Eggpreneur. The Elevator Prize brand and support will help us leverage the growth structures within government systems, secure global partners to scale our impact. The Elevator Prize funds, will be used to scale Eggpreneur model of Cooperative platform to five other countries in Africa and Mexico.

The funds will be invested back in each Eggpreneur coop group to build vertical integrated value chain in poultry industry, from feed manufacturing, breeding, hatching, distribution, and marketing. Our main goal is to achieve social system change in addressing women economic challenges and policy changes that undermine women micro-entrepreneurship.

The Elevate Prize support and mentorship will equip Eggpreneur Coop to solve issues of gender equality, unemployment, food security, finance, and social entrepreneurship sectors to dismantle barriers in implement women entrepreneurship reforms and sustainable cooperatives that prevent marginalized women from running successful business.

 The Win will boost Eggpreneur model to a global platform where we can share our best practices in creating pro-women agribusiness cooperatives with collective ownership which build local economics, market access and sustainable economic growth. 

As a former street child in Kenya, I have personally experienced life in abject poverty. I know what it feels like to be hungry, malnourished, and in despair for my family and future. Thanks to a few sponsors, I was given the opportunity to attend school, later furthered my post-secondary education, degree, and a Master in Global Health, at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

My vision is to scale Eggpreneur model to build sustainable smallholder women farmer groups with innovative local business solutions to ending poverty, malnutrition, and unemployment, among women and youth across developing countries.

Our goals in five to ten years are to scale the Eggpreneur model in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to impact over 1 million lives by 2025. Eggpreneur model is simple to replicate, scalable at low cost, generates sustainable income and resilience among resource-poor communities through our proven Eggpreneur cooperative platform. The Eggpreneur Cooperative model helps realize women's economic empowerment with increased household income and robust market contracts and partnerships. Overall success is to create stable local economics, women equality and improved livelihoods, and sustainable local businesses to build their countries.

Hunger, poverty, and unemployment are endemic in rural communities in developing countries. Over 500 million women and youth are unemployed in low-income countries in Africa and Asian, in absence of social safety nets, women migrate as refugees for their survival. High unemployment rates and income inequalities perpetuate the cycle of poverty, particularly for women. Consequently, the health & welfare of their children are compromised. The biggest barrier COVID pandemic, home & child responsibilities, and limited education.

Although agriculture occupies 70 percent of labor force in Africa, UN estimates smallholder farmers consume a large share of what they produce. The challenge may appear daunting, but Africa’s growing labor-force is an asset in the global marketplace. Realizing this, Eggpreneur addresses unemployment and malnutrition by two dimensions: Human capital- we equip, support and educate with knowledge and business skills to establish their poultry farming, -Business Environment- we create cooperatives platform for women poultry farmers to access land, capital, technology and markets as well as government support, to produce, harvest and sell products to local and international markets. Eggpreneur Coop solution is to empower, aggregate produce and market access market demand and generate steady revenue while creating jobs and nutritional value for their families. 

Our innovation is how we address food security and gender equity by building self-sustaining and scalable cooperative-run poultry farming businesses among marginalized women and communities. Women are not just employees in the business- they are co-owners of the business. Eggpreneur Cooperative model creates grass-roots agribusiness run, owned, and operated by members, we pride our model on locally produced and sustainable food. In turn, this improves local communities and instills sense of purpose and belonging to a greater good.

Our key disruption is the approach and business model we offer two key solutions, Human capital, the supply side, we equip members with skills, connections, network and cooperative as a business network and Business Environment, members access to land, finance, infrastructure, technology and markets and program for economic growth. We work with women who are substance farmers living in rural areas. Women are the key drivers of our model to run home-based businesses, our approach is simple to engage women who live in the rural areas to raise poultry to feed the population in the big cities while earning an income. About 75% of women stay in rural farms and have plenty of free time to work on their home-based business. 

We have indicators we measure based on our data register at our baseline survey which we conducted, at beginning of new group project. We annually measure our outcomes based these indicators; household income, household budget, agribusiness production, children attending school, number of women trained, improved knowledge in running a business, nutritional and percentage of families getting out of extreme poverty.

In the last five years we have trained and supported over 2500 farmers across the five countries we run Eggpreneur. To date, we have produced over 4 million trays of eggs, provided over 3000 families with nutrition, increased household income from $20 to $120 per month spanning across 5 countries.

Our strategic plan to create vertical integration process within Eggpreneur farmers cooperative with hatchery, chick’s distribution and poultry collection center, the integration implementation will be replicated in other region through our partnership.

Build product branding in each market segment to amplify our agribusiness products. We hope to uberize our model and scale due to its sharing economic model (uberizing eggs) by decentralizing the risk and leverage the willingness and manpower of women Eggpreneur and market penetration to be the biggest produce of fresh poultry products in our region.