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Isaac Ceci with his GrainMate moisture meter in Accra, Ghana. Photo by Richard Akakpo
Written by Sefakol Fekpe, Bird Story Agency
Sesi Technologies, an agricultural technology company, is focused on creating cost-effective, technology-driven solutions for farmers. The company’s flagship product, his GrainMate, is a grain moisture meter designed to allow grain handlers to easily measure moisture content, minimizing post-harvest losses.
Isaac Ceci picks up a small bucket of corn and demonstrates his latest moisture-measuring device. After powering the device with a battery, press a button and a white screen will appear displaying various particle options for testing. He selects the corn category and presses another button to start reading. Sesi is demonstrating the latest model of his GrainMate moisture meter, a device he developed to combat food waste in rural rural areas.
“Moisture content is one of the essential physical quantities that determines the quality of the final product. That’s why we devised GrainMate, which makes it easy to know the moisture content of a product,” Sesi explains. To do.
As a young man from a rural village in the Ashanti region of Ghana, Seshi was familiar with the challenges of storing grain, having witnessed first-hand the difficulties his parents and other farmers experienced in storing their produce. He has dedicated his academic career to finding solutions to this food waste problem.
His first device was completed in 2018. The idea is to allow farmers, aggregators, feed producers, and everyone else involved in the grain value chain to easily measure the moisture content of grain before storage, feed preparation, or processing. did.
“One aspect of food security is that 30% of the food we produce is lost, so we are in the process of being able to reduce or mitigate post-harvest losses. If we can reduce these losses, that bodes well for food security. ‘Because the food that is being lost is the food that can be fed to other people,’ says Ceci.
Currently, Sesi Technologies’ GrainMate is cheaper compared to other imported moisture meter brands.
Sesi’s company offers two models. One is for regular grains and sells for 800 Ghanaian cedis (approximately $65 USD). The second model also applies to high-value products such as shea nuts. This version costs 1,000 Ghanaian Cedis (approximately $83 USD).
Sesi graduated from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and devised GrainMate using his final year research project.
“In Ghana, you can finish your research and just put it on the shelf and move on with your life, but we thought we had developed something pretty good and we wanted to make it useful to farmers. , I founded Sesi Technologies to commercialize the results of my research at KNUST,” says Sesi.
The company’s breakthrough came with the sale of 150 devices. “Sesi Technologies was initially funded through a large pre-order by an international non-profit organization, which provided the funds needed to produce his first 150 units and hire his first employees. ,” the entrepreneur said in a previous interview.
Since then, Ceci has relied on revenue from the sale of moisture meters and other services, and his company has received funding from a variety of sources.
“We started with no money, no money at all. We just started commercializing this technology. We were able to produce the first batch only because of a few pre-orders. Because of that, we were able to ask the client to pay 70% and use that to fund the initial inventory,” he says.
Determined to reach as many farmers as possible, Ceci participated in various start-up support programs. In 2019, he emerged as the overall winner of the GoGettaz Agripreneur Award, an award given to African agri-food innovators and entrepreneurs who are developing solutions for their agricultural value chain.
“We won a total of $50,000 in prizes.”
This award helped expand both production and human resources.
“We have around 25 people on our team and we see that we are making good progress as our monthly payroll bill is significant. We also have a field team responsible for delivering the services we provide to our farmers. ” he explains.
More than 5,000 farmers are currently trying out the device, but uptake has been slower than Sethi and his young team expected. “The adoption of new technology is so slow that we haven’t yet seen the rapid adoption that we’re hoping for.”
However, feedback from the current user pool keeps Sesi and his team motivated.
“For example, poultry farmers use our device to check the moisture content of various ingredients in feed before mixing it. They tell us that they have high productivity, high productivity, and that they know their birds won’t suffer from disease because our equipment helps them.”
In a previous interview How we succeeded in Africa, Sesi said the biggest mistake was underestimating how long it would take to build the product. “We are new to building commercial hardware products and did not anticipate all the challenges we would face along the way. For this reason, we would like to thank our largest customer who has made a huge bet on us. We ended up over-promising, and that almost led to our downfall. Now we know better.”
Sesi is optimistic about growth and is eyeing a local manufacturing facility that will hire skilled engineers to increase production capacity and drive mass adoption of GrainMate devices.
“Ultimately, the goal is to be able to produce and assemble more,” he said.
/Torimonogatarisha
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