Our goal is to empower farmers by providing them with financial assistance, extension services, and market access. This will help to improve their financial capacity, enhance their agricultural practices, and augment their incomes. Our vision is to create scalable, comprehensive cooling solutions for the agricultural value chain.
Majority of small scale rural farmers are faced with a lot of challenges that make their efforts unfruitful. with lack of capital, poor storage facilities for shelf life produce.
Many farmers in rural Uganda find themselves making upto 50% loss in profit from their farming profits. Perishable products like tomatoes often get rotten before they can reach the market.
Creamo and Einstein Rising in collaboration organized the Cold Chain Development Hackathon, which brought together a diverse group of stakeholders, including cooling systems experts, solar energy suppliers, farm-to-fork entrepreneurs, and business experts and student entrepreneurs.
The objective of the hackathon was to actively innovate and develop cost-effective, sustainable, and comprehensive cooling solutions for Uganda, in order to meet the growing demand for cooling power in the food supply chain and
other industries within the country. The 2-day Hackathon brought together 5 teams who developed over 5 solutions. The teams presented their cooling solution business ideas to a panel of judges, and as a result, two teams were awarded prizes of 3M UGX and 2M UGX respectively. These winning teams moved forward and received incubation.
In January 2022, we began incubating the ideas from the Hackathon in order to bring at least one of the solutions to market. From the 5 teams, we selected 2 members from each team to represent their group for further idea incubation and development in Einstein Rising’s SE4Africa Incubator Program.
This program spanned 6 weeks and covered key business disciplines such as Business Model Canvas, Customer Discovery, Market Research, Branding, Sales & Marketing, and more. This helped the teams validate and develop their market-fit cooling solutions.
We conducted a feasibility study in 7 districts: Mbale, Luweero, Bududa, Mityana,
Kayunga, Wakiso, and Bulambuli. During the study, we visited over 130 farmers and farmer groups to assess the challenges related to food waste and to develop energy efficient cooling technologies to address gaps in the food value chain.
During our technical feasibility study, we uncovered that farmers experience significant losses of up to 40% of their harvests due to poor post-harvest handling and market access. Additionally, we identified challenges such as counterfeit seeds, counterfeit pesticides, and exploitation by intermediaries.
To address these issues, we have established the Agrimulimi Fresh Farmers Association, which aims to provide agricultural credit and low-tech cooling solutions.
Our team, in conjunction with a group of Belgian students from Humasol, spent 4 weeks in Kayunga to conduct a technical feasibility study. The goal of this study was to design various Zero Energy Cooling Chambers (ZECC) in the Kayunga District.
ZECC is a low-tech evaporative cooling solution for fresh produce farmers, which aims to reduce food waste by extending the shelf life of produce by an additional 21 days after harvest.
2022 served as a launchpad for us to gain momentum and enter 2023 with confidence! Agrimulimi Fresh Solutions is an incorporated company, with dedicated co-founders leading the charge in our strategic scaling and robust work and financial plans for 2023. Building on the key learnings and achievements of 2022, our team is well-prepared to execute in the upcoming seasons.
We build new ventures that contribute to the creation of a social, renewable and circular society.
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