Someone who seized this opportunity is Jonny Rowland. Having spent a big part of his childhood in Uganda, he saw the opportunity in the growing thirst for sustainable, high-quality coffee 鈥� and an opportunity to ensure that coffee farmers would receive their fair share in this business. Together with his sister Beth, he founded , a profit-for-purpose business that works directly with local farmers to achieve higher yields and the high quality coffee that is sought after on the global market.

With the support of local experts working for Agri Evolve, farmers have improved their productivity and increased income for themselves, their families, and their communities. The main idea of this social enterprise is to use digital technology to improve established supply chains for coffee cherries in the Rwenzori Mountains, one of Uganda鈥檚 key habitats for Arabica coffee plants, and share the latest agricultural practices with local farmers.

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A Long-Lasting Tradition: Coffee in Uganda

Uganda is one of the few countries in the world where coffee plants are native. The processed beans are an integral part of Uganda’s export economy, making the country one of the 10 largest coffee producers in the world. In recent years, Uganda has made a name for its specialty Arabica, which thrives in the local climate with humid days and cool nights. But Arabica coffee, a climate sensitive plant, is beginning to struggle as global warming shortens the cooler phases it needs to thrive. This requires adjusting the traditional ways of cultivating the cherries.

Over 1.8 million households in Uganda grow coffee, and听coffee contributes nearly a third of the country’s export earnings, paying for critical infrastructure like roads, hospitals, and schools. While many families grow coffee, it was hard to make a living out of it in the past and motivation to produce high quality was low as prices on global markets wouldn鈥檛 justify the effort.

Joyce Birungi is one of the coffee farmers living high in the rainforest of the Rwenzori Mountains who registered with Agri Evolve as a supplier. Like most farmers in this remote area, she took care of the plants based on traditions passed down over generations. The cherries were often picked too early and only ripened while drying in the sun for longer periods, which caused a loss in quality and therefore lower prices. Climate changes, like increases in floods, droughts, and heat waves, put additional pressure on the traditional ways of farming.

鈥淚n the past, I used to pick coffee cherries of poor quality. So, I lost a lot of money,鈥� Birungi said, explaining her challenges as a small local producer before working with Agri Evolve. 鈥淭ransportation was a big challenge. I had no way of selling the coffee and I didn鈥檛 know about best practices in farming and agribusiness.”

Collins Kifula is a field coordinator at Agri Evolve and an expert for sustainability and quality. He works closely with the farmers, registering each farmer using a mobile app based on the 麻豆原创 Rural Sourcing Management solution and collecting data like the size of the farm and the state of the coffee trees. Using the mobile app saves time 鈥� time he can use to talk to the farmers and solve issues they might be facing or suggest improvements to their current setup. One important focus of his work is education on soil protection. With floods happening more frequently these days, farmers benefit from terraces and planting grass patches to avoid the fertile soil being washed away by rain.

As Agri Evolve is specialized in high-quality, sustainable coffee, certification is required. 鈥淲e need to hold up to a certain level of quality and we do that by getting, for example, the . To receive this, we need to raise data and have the transparency. Here, the mobile app within 麻豆原创 Rural Sourcing Management is of huge help,鈥� Kifula explained.

鈥淭echnology Is Changing Things鈥�

The biggest challenges the farmers faced before starting to work with Agri Evolve was the quality of the cherries and the lack of price transparency. Sometimes there was even fraud along the process of collecting the cherries. 鈥淭echnology is changing things,鈥� Kifula said.

Today, farmers still deliver their cherries to so-called middlemen who check the quality, but they now document the weight using the 麻豆原创 app. The farmers instantly receive an SMS message showing the delivered quantity and its value. 鈥淭his price transparency is a big motivation for the farmers and creates trust,鈥� he said. Further, 麻豆原创 Rural Sourcing Management enables the calculation of the accrued delivery quantities and therefore the yield a farm is producing, which are used as the assessment basis to provide loans to the farmers.

Keeping Track of Data

鈥淥ur mission is to do sustainable farming for future generations. As a social enterprise, Agri Evolve works with a growing number of farmers, which can quickly add complexity to our supply chain. Today, we deal with around 22,000 smallholders. We collect a lot of data that needs to be analyzed,鈥� Roset Biira, field supervisor at Agri Evolve, said. “We needed a system that collects and analyzes our data in an efficient way 鈥� to be able to be transparent to all our farmers and even our clients.鈥� Using 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud, Biira showed how Agri Evolve can identify if coffee trees are getting old or are weakened by pests early on. Based on these predictions, they consult with the farmers on planting new trees or suggest trainings on pest control.

Realizing Change

Agri Evolve is building a network of trust with the farmers and middlemen, making sure to give the best price possible to the farmers so that the local societies participate in the higher prices sustainable coffee can generate on the global markets.

鈥淚鈥檓 now able to increase my coffee production and send my kids to school, and I hope that they will graduate from university and have better lives. We used to live in semi-permanent houses, but now we are moving to permanent housing,鈥� Birungi said when asked what impact this new way of collaboration has had on her and her family.

Talking about the future of the growing profit-for-purpose business and its network of local coffee producers, Beth Rowland, co-founder of Agri Evolve, said: 鈥淲e will continue to push the boundaries of supply chain transparency through digitalization to allow us to provide the best service to smallholder farmers in the Rwenzoris.鈥� For the family business, it is important to ensure connected farmers have access to a fair and transparent market for their coffee cherries.

While sharing sustainable practices to counteract the impact of environmental changes is a requirement for the production of certified sustainable coffee, it will also make sure that the tradition of coffee production will live on in the Rwenzori mountains of Uganda.

This article first appeared on the 麻豆原创 News Center.

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Following a year of constrained growth – East Africa saw only meagre growth of 0.9% in 2020, compared to 6.6% in 2019 – economies across the region look poised to recover some lost ground.

According to , Kenya is expected to see growth of 6.3% in 2021, Ethiopia 4%, Uganda 3.7%, Rwanda 5.7% and Tanzania 5.2% in 2021.

While traditional sectors such as tourism took a heavy knock due to the lockdowns imposed as well as limits to international travel, the region鈥檚 tech sector proved resilient and could hold promising potential for accelerating the region鈥檚 economic recovery.

For example, mobile money, for which the region is considered a global leader, continued to perform well. Mobile money transfers in Kenya grew by 62.9% in 2020, largely due to social distancing measures that saw consumers shy away from cash payments.

The (healthy) state of start-up innovation in East Africa

The quality of fintech start-ups that has emerged in East Africa over the past decade has established the region as one of the continent’s most innovative.

Nairobi, long considered as a regional technology and trade hub, recently took a bold step toward also becoming a world-class financial hub with the launch of the Nairobi International Financial Centre. The centre could unlock a new era international investment into East Africa and its vibrant business ecosystem, by the UK government.

The region has also established vital innovation hubs to provide support and greater market opportunities for local innovators.

Rwanda’s provides an open space for collaboration and innovation, and brings together students, thinkers, and entrepreneurs to turn concepts into viable products and services. In Uganda, the incubation and innovation space provides similar support to local entrepreneurs, while has brought together innovators and some of the world’s leading organisations to accelerate start-up activity in the country.

And in Kenya, the , a brand new smart city spanning 2000 hectares and designed to create up to 100 000 new jobs, is currently under construction. Once completed, the smart city will play host to business processing outsourcing, software development, data centres, call centres, a university campus and residential units, schools and hospitals.

Supporting innovators and entrepreneurs

There is arguably a vital role that larger enterprises can play in supporting the region鈥檚 start-ups and fostering greater innovation.

In the energy sector, green energy innovation in investment into the continent’s transition away from fossil fuel energy. As large global enterprises shift to more sustainable practices and boost investment into cleaner technologies, partnerships with local innovators could prove beneficial and ensure knowledge and revenue is retained locally.

Building climate-resilient infrastructure – a growing concern for nations facing the escalating impacts of rapid climate change – holds a further investment opportunity of between $130-billion and $170-billion.

And investment into the circular economy could unlock not only new innovation, but an opportunity to reverse some of the more harmful and unsustainable business practices that are still prevalent today and establish the region as a leader in the fight for sustainability. Examples of circular economy innovation in East Africa abounds:

Kapa Oil Refineries, one of Kenya鈥檚 leading manufacturers of sustainably and ethically produced consumer goods, has established more than 1.5GW of solar power to reduce the impact of its operations on the environment.

Silafrica, the region鈥檚 largest packaging manufacturer, has embedded circular economy principles in its production processes, and today counts leading global companies such as Coca-Cola among its customers.

And CP Solar Resources, a leading solar power installer in Kenya, is providing households, businesses and manufacturers with turnkey solar power options to reduce the strain on Kenya鈥檚 power grid while advancing the growth of the local green economy.

Such examples point to a growing ecosystem of contributors to the circular economy, driven by the region鈥檚 听most innovative entrepreneurs and companies.

As we work together to repair the economic damage wrought by the pandemic and endeavour to build a more sustainable and equitable society, our world-class tech start-ups could hold the key to our collective success. It is vital that we provide them with the support they need to find solutions to some of our most pressing challenges.

The post Could Tech ‘Lions’ Prowling Silicon Savannah Hold Key to East Africa’s Post-Pandemic Recovery? appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

Mukwano Industries is one of the great success stories of the Ugandan business world. From humble beginnings as a general dealer in Kampala in the 1980s, the company has grown into one of the leading FMCG conglomerates in East Africa, with interests that include manufacturing, agriculture and property development. Its products, ranging from petroleum jelly and detergents to cooking oil and soap; from drinking water to household and commercial plastics; can be found in every home across Uganda.

The major challenge for the company was that its technology infrastructure had not kept pace with its growth. It had implemented 麻豆原创 ECC 6.0 back in 2008, and the now dated platform was creating a host of issues: numerous custom developments, plant maintenance and operations not implemented, and an enduring dependency on paper-based systems and Excel spreadsheets.

鈥淲e had data everywhere, but information nowhere,鈥� says Mukwano CEO Tony Gadhoke. 鈥淭his meant we had low cost insights and a growing need for operational efficiencies. Something had to give. So we decided to shed our legacy systems and move our core business processes to the Cloud using the 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Public Cloud platform. In doing so, we aimed to leverage Cloud capabilities to improve technical and operational agility, enhance real-time visibility across the business, harmonise data, improve reporting, and enable future growth and innovation.鈥�

There was just one catch: the business insisted on a rapid implementation strategy to reduce the amount of time and resources needed, by around 35%, to implement the project. In effect, this meant replacing Mukwano鈥檚 core systems and training the necessary people to be able to go live, within five and a half months.

There were a couple of factors working in Mukwano鈥檚 favour: the company wanted a 鈥渂est practices鈥� 麻豆原创 system, which meant minimal customisation time. And partner iMark Technologies鈥� 鈥榸ero fat鈥� approach to getting projects done, combined with Mukwano鈥檚 highly structured project management approach, ensured the implementation never deviated from its time scale for a moment.

鈥淎part from the incredibly tight timeframe for the implementation, our biggest challenge was that we were changing the organizational structure completely to align to the 麻豆原创 system. This meant we had to ensure the right people were in the right positions. To ensure immediate buy-in and adoption of the new system by its users, we ran extensive training sessions every day, with ongoing monitoring of skill absorption, to ensure as high a level of ownership as possible,鈥� said Gadhoke.

This meant cancelling all leave for the duration of the project 鈥� including over Christmas and New Year 鈥� to ensure every individual was onboard and the project didn鈥檛 deviate from the timeline. 鈥淚t was tough, but we had no choice. There was no room for a redo, and we had to make sure we got it right first time,鈥� said Gadhoke.

Ultimately, the effort was worth it, with the results of the implementation exceeding Mukwano鈥檚 already high expectations. In a first for Uganda, the business put its core business systems into the Cloud by the agreed deadline, with minimal disruption to the business. The company has already seen significant gains in productivity and faster time to market. It has greater visibility into its operations than ever before, through an intuitive, unified platform from which it can oversee its business operations from end-to-end. It has also seen a 鈥榟uge鈥� reduction in capex on its server infrastructure and IT resources.

Gadhoke said partner iMark Technologies鈥� experience in the digital transformation of organisations in the East African region was critical to the success of the project. S Iyer, the managing director of iMark, said: 鈥淚t has been very exciting for us to see how organisations like Mukwano are realising the promise of digital transformation by leveraging 麻豆原创 technologies and solutions to effect transformational change.

Mukwano has already been able to achieve significant progress in its operational excellence with S/4 HANA, thanks to the incredible analytics functionality that has been unlocked. 鈥淭he next steps in our journey will be to focus on people performance and excellence. But we鈥檙e confident that we have the right platform in place to take the business to the next level,鈥� said Gadhoke.

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