October 31, 2012
Danny Alexander and his IDEO.org team have arrived in Kenya to start our first Innovation Fund project, designing ways to leverage existing technologies and information streams to provide greater technical training for rural farmers.
Jambo from Kenya!
Matteo, Carla and I arrived in Nairobi this week to begin our work with Juhudi Kilimo, our first IDEO.org Innovation Fund partner. With support from the Wasserman Foundation, we started the Innovation Fund this year to support promising, high-impact organizations and entrepreneurs that we otherwise might not be able to partner with. As part of the Innovation Fund, we're providing pro bono design work, which is a first for IDEO.org and really, really exciting to be a part of. After receiving dozens of nominations for Innovation Fund candidates, we've selected four organizations with which we're doing two-week human-centered design deep dives. Juhudi Kilimo is one of two innovation fund projects that we'll be working with in Kenya.
Juhudi Kilimo is a unique microfinance organization serving over 10,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya, with plans of reaching over 100,000 in the next few years. Unlike traditional microfinance institutions—which generally don't serve a large percentage of rural Kenyans—Juhudi Kilimo provides agriculture-based, micro-asset financing loans to assist smallholder farmers in acquiring productive assets such as dairy cows, chickens and irrigation equipment. By focusing their financing on assets that have been proven to generate revenue (like a cow or a new piece of irrigation equipment), Juhudi Kilimo ensures that farmers improve their yields while also eliminating the need for collateral. The end result? Less risk for both Juhudi Kilimo and rural farmers receiving these loans.
Although Juhudi Kilimo already provides rigorous financial training along with their loans, they've identified an opportunity to provide greater agricultural training and support to help their clients improve agricultural production. Because some of the farming-related assets purchased with a loan from Juhudi Kilimo are new to farmers, the learning curve can be steep and access to information is often limited in rural Kenya. There are plenty of challenges to providing additional training, of course—cost and transportation being among the biggest—but we're here in Kenya to help Juhudi Kilimo ask: How might we leverage existing technologies and information streams to provide greater technical training to farmers?
We'll be headed out to the farms in Kericho, Litein and Kisii tomorrow to hear directly from rural farmers. My teammate Matteo is also very much hoping to milk a cow while we're out there. Stay tuned for updates.