One place for 5,000 farmers to check the weather, find buyers and sell direct.
A farmer with a good harvest and no information is still in trouble. That was the pattern our client kept seeing. Crops came in, then sat in poor storage while the grower guessed at prices and waited for a buyer to appear. By the time a deal was done, a third of the yield had spoiled, and the traders who did turn up took most of what was left.
The client wanted to close the gap between the field and the market. We built a platform the farmers could actually reach, which meant it had to work on the web, in an app, and over USSD for the simple phones most of them carry. Into it we fed weather forecasts tuned to each region and readings from sensors placed in the fields, so a grower gets a real sense of what is coming and when to move a crop. The same platform connects them straight to buyers, with no one taking a cut in the middle.
The results showed up where they matter to a farming household. Losses after harvest fell by 35 percent. More than 5,000 farmers were selling directly into markets they could not reach before, and average income among them rose by 45 percent. Ten regions now get forecasts accurate enough to plan around.