Hosted by Robert Rimm
Most fertilizers today are produced in large-scale, centralized facilities and then imported to rural areas. Due to the logistical mark-up, rural farmers in emerging economies such as Africa and India often pay much more than the rest of the world for their fertilizers. This adds to the cost of food production for small-scale farmers, driving them into a vicious cycle of poverty.
Safi Organics uses technology to downsize and decentralize fertilizer production, making it feasible to implement on a village-level basis using locally available resources and labor. This reduces the logistical cost and produces a high-quality product that, at the same price as conventional fertilizers, can improve farmers’ yields by up to 30%.
As a secondary environmental benefit, Safi Organics carbon-rich fertilizer sequesters carbon into the soil for hundreds of years; at the same time, their conversion process also curbs the particulate emissions from traditional open-field crop residue burning by more than 95%.
Joyce Kamande is a social entrepreneur whose heart is deeply intertwined to improving food security and livelihoods of small-scale farmers across Africa. With an MSc in Procurement and logistics from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture Technology, she is a co-founder and the Operations Manager in Safi Organics.
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