For Tanzania’s 15 million smallholder farmers, harvesting crops is a daunting task. whether they are harvesting rice, maize, sorghum, or other crops, farmers are forced to use manual threshing that are inefficient and limit farm productivity.
about 97% of Tanzania’s 6 million smallholder farms lack the machinery to aid in agricultural labor, and less than 50% have access to electricity at the community level. Lack of access to electricity and mechanisation prevents farmers from adding value to their harvests and forces them to rely on laborious, time-consuming agricultural practices.
Imara Tech is a social enterprise in the agriculture value chain that improves the lives of smallholder farmers by empowering communities with locally produced technologies for productive use. Imara Tech addresses the issue of farmers’ lack of access to technology which severely limits their productivity because nearly all their work entails arduous manual labor.
Imara Tech brings mechanisation to hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers by fabricating productive-use agricultural equipment like the Multi-Crop Thresher (MCT), an engine-driven machine that threshes crops up to 75 times faster than manual methods and saves the average small farm over over two weeks of post-harvest labor. The MCT is marketed to rural enterpreneurs who purchase and operate the Product-As-A-Service business in their community, generating income and providing smallholders with access to mechanised equipment they could not afford otherwise.
“We founded Imara Tech with the sole intention of impacting the lives of youth and rural communities. Imara Tech has already employed most of thee youth and shown them through our work how they can become self-employed and have a positive impact on the community. Together we have reached 12,000 farms, and for me as an enterpreneur, that represents our greatest achievement.” Alfred Chengula .
Since 2015, Imara Tech has sold over 400 MCT’s, generating TZS 640,000,000 (about USD 280,320.00) in revenue. Individual enterpreneurs utilized 252 of these machines to launch threshing business, generating a total anticipated income of TZS 695,520,000 (about USD 304,637.76).
In the third episode of Kijana Leo TV program, Imara Tech is at the pinnacle of its business expansion, having received over one hundred inquires from Tanzania and East Africa as a whole and selling over thirty machines to local farmers over a period of six months.
Watch Full Episode from our YouTube Channel:
