Software engineer on creating platform linking smallholder farmers to markets

Like her family members, Liliane Uwintwali grew up with a passion for farming. At home, they had a big garden where her father used to cultivate different kinds of vegetables, and Uwintwali would water them whenever she returned from school. In 2009, when she started pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Software Engineering at the University of Rwanda – College of Science and Technology, she thought she was disconnecting herself from the passion, but little did she know she was feeding it in a different way. She realised that the connection was still there in December 2012 when she and her fellow teammates were challenged by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to think of a project that could help in solving issues that existed in their communities. That was after they completed training on software and mobile application development. Of course, their thoughts revolved around agriculture. They started interviewing different farmers, especially smallholders, to find out if they were facing challenges they could help them to solve. According to Uwintwali, getting a good market for their produce was a recurring issue among the challenges they were facing. “Most of the time,” she said, “the middle men would approach smallholder farmers and persuade them to sell to them their produce at a small price because they needed money to feed their kids, send them to school and pay for other expenses.” “The women,” she continued, “pointed out they had problems accessing finance because they didn’t have enough land to pledge as collateral so that they could secure loans to invest in their farming activities.” Pondering on the solution they could provide, Uwintwali and her teammates thought of a technology that would inform smallholder farmers about available market opportunities and, in the long run, gain trust of financial institutions by presenting good records of how they earned their income. They founded Mahwi Tech with their online platform ‘Mlima’ with an aim of digitalising agriculture value chain. Uwintwali said they started developing the platform bit by bit, working on both the web and mobile application they would use to share information concerning the produce of smallholder farmers. They started with grains such as beans and maize. The web application, according to Uwintwali, was later upgraded to address cooperative demands. She said that a small-holder farmer uses USSD code *515# on their feature phone and is able to register themselves and publish their produce, adding that Mlima can make that information accessible to traders who are in need of the produce. “Our business bridges the demand and supply chain gap. Sometimes, a cooperative has a produce in excess and yet the same produce is needed at Kigali market, but they don’t know. Our platform is trying to bridge this mismatch so that companies that can add value on the produce, can be able to easily locate it,” she said. During Covid-19 lockdown, Uwintwali and the team were able to add a payment option on their website as well as contracting farmers, helping them to secure the market before harvesting. The number of farmers they were working with also shot up from 10 cooperatives to 60 in just two years, according to Mukantwari. She said they also digitised the aggregation process; dealing with collecting commodities from different members of cooperatives so that they could bargain for a bigger market at a good price. “We had a list of cooperatives in a given district and we would select a number of them, pay them a visit and train them on how they could access our system online,” she said. “In order to scale up, in 2016, we adopted a new approach to work through development partners with whom we share the same goals and objectives. With the resources they had and footprints of their agents on the ground, we became their technology partner and they helped us to reach more farmers where possible.” Uwintwali stated that they are currently working with 20,000 smallholder farmers grouped in 60 cooperatives, adding that they are currently able to sell their produce at a good price. However, she said they still have challenges regarding meeting the standards of good quality produce, declaring that it leads to rejection of some produce by potential customers, but they hope to work with partners to sort out the issue. On September 7, Mukantwali of Mahwi Tech emerged among the winners of the 2022 Women Agripreneur of the Year Award and received a grant of $20,000. She said the prize opened doors for her business to expand in other parts of Africa and inspired other young women to build something for their communities. Tackling how her firm earned, Uwintwali said that initially, they were getting paid by development partners after helping them to achieve their target, but currently, they are going commercial and will be charging smallholder farmers a moderate subscription fee from their profit to ensure their business is run sustainably. She said that apart from 12 districts they are currently operating in, they plan to scale up to all districts to on-board many smallholder farmers. They also plan to on-board more crops, including vegetables, and to scale up to other countries as they were requested.

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Software engineer on creating platform linking smallholder farmers to markets