ONACHIL FOOD STORE

Elevate Prize comes at a time when we are planning to scale our business across boarders . This scale up comes with additional expenses that include marketing, recruiting of new staff among others. We are therefore going to use this prize money to make sure that there is soft landing in the new markets we intend to reach. The biggest portion of this prize is won will go to making sure that our new markets understand our product, translating the our products into languages understood in the new markets. I cannot forget to say that the mentorship given by the program will not live us the same in terms of readiness scale.

I grew up in rural Uganda and our village grew tomatoes livelihood. I used to see a man called Kyaka come at home immediately after harvest telling us" the prices of tomatoes were low in Kampala”. Kyaka enjoyed the Monopoly since he knew none of the farmers ways to know tomato prices in the city & to make matters worse he knew if farmers refused to sell their tomatoes to him, they would end up loosing them since they could not preserve them. I started this based on this experience. I do not want to see a farmer being manipulated by middlemen when I can do something out of my experience to solve the problem.

More than 60% of the Ugandans population depend on agriculture for food and livelihood. It’s Unfortunate that most of these farmers are always manipulated by middlemen who came to learn that farmers in Uganda will be ready to take up any price offered to them after harvest simply because of fear of post-harvest loss a factor that amplified by lack of more reliable and affordable means of produce preservation after harvest in addition to lack of direct contact to buyers and Market price information buyers barriers. In the efforts tor reduce this manipulation, Onachil makes, sells/rents solar powered cold chain technology which allows farmers to safely preserve their produces without fear of the immediate post harvest loss. We go on to link our customers directly to buyers using our conversational AI E-Commerce chatbot. This allows cashless transactions between buyers and farmers. At Onachil we believe in productive Agriculture we therefore avail farmers with AI predicted seasonal forecasts that in the end help them to plan what and when to grow a 

As the saying goes, "Experience is the best teacher," Onachil was formed based on personal experience. This has made the whole process of eliminating middlemen from being a moneymaking idea to somehow being more of an attachment. The company spends much on carrying out Research and Development based on evidence from the founders' experiences and lessons to come up with technologies that others who probably entered business for only profit outcompeted. For example using our founders' experience as a benchmark, We've come to learn that middlemen have taken advantage of the fact that farmers never have modern storage facilities to preserve their produces for a long time after harvest as they look out for appropriate buyers since they always fear post harvest loss to manipulate and give them prices of their own. We not only link farmers to customers but also make/sell to them solar powered cold chain technology which they use to safely preserve their food as we link to customers using our Artificial Intelligence E-Commerce conversational chatbot.

Onachil as a social enterprise, our major emphasis is serving those who can not afford the services on the market because of the high prices. We therefore strive hard to reach this target population for those seeking our cold technology to safely preserve their harvest but can not afford upfront payment, we link them directly to our partner financial institutions who offer them the technology as an asset finance loan. For our chatbot technology, it is trained and well equipped to give services in local languages and this is so because we want them to use it without being hindered by the language barriers. Lastly we know that most of our customers do not have smart phones, so if we are to sell as much as possible, we needed to devise means to have it extended to those with basic phones and as I speak, we offer services even using the SMS Chatbot.