"SAVE MY GRANDMOTHER STORY."
The story of Mazao Hub began ways back in Sumbawanga villages-Tanzania. Working as a poor smallholder farmer with my grandmother. It was unfair and discouraging. Challenges like exploitative buying from middlemen, post harvest loss, lack of direct market to trade, logistic inefficiency, storage and lack of credit facilities. There was a time when i have to use bicycle to transport farm produce to the market more than 30 miles away. It was common even today to lose money, time and farm produces because sales depended on multiple layers of brokers to get goods to the markets. And each middleman took a cut that ate into our family’s income.
Because of these challenges my grandmother told me “When you grow up, come back and save us we poor smallholder farmers”
While others may be ashamed of and frustrated by these problems, I saw opportunities shared this vision with my good friend, Adelard Urassa. He was very excited because he went through the same experience. We joined hands and started an e-commerce platform for farmers "Sokoworld". Managed to get more than 12,000 users but failed.
Why we failed? What i Learned?
Majority of users were middlemen. I left the City and went back to the Village. I wanted to learn from my mistakes. What went wrong with my startup? While being in the village, working with smallholder farmers and agro input dealers. I learned the hard way. Small Scale Farmers in Africa are not getting reliable agronomic support due to current poor local agro dealer’s distribution system and unfriendly agricultural Value Chain resulting to low productivity, poor quality produce and food wastage. Another big challenge is data. There is no proper food systems to track quality and really data about smallholder farmers. Even the government is facing the same challenge. Most of these so called data about farmers from Africa are based on guesses and inaccurate estimations. I shared these challenges to my friend, Adelard Urassa.
We joined hands and interviewed 240 Small Scale Farmers and Agro Dealers and came up with our innovative solution which is Mazao Hub that functions as a comprehensive Farm Management platform connecting farmers, Agro dealers, agronomists, Warehouse, Logistics and stakeholders while automating their operations to run best. With this innovation, we came back stronger and powerful than before.
We got accepted into government incubation program under DTBI and Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology. We managed to reach 4,760 really farmers with very little capital because of strategic partnership with Agronomists, agro dealers, warehouse, logistics and other stakeholders. It feels so good to make money from these users at the same time making impacts to 4,760 smallholder farmers.
The purpose and dream that birthed Mazao Hub, is to solve market linkage bypassing middlemen, logistical inefficiency, food insecurity, financial inclusion, affordable agro inputs and extension services for local farmers, local producers and local manufacturers in the agricultural value chain. We are on the mission to help smallholder farmers in the most profitable way. We have covered it all from the seed , harvest, warehouse, logistics and market . We enable all these stakeholders to automate their operations profitably, transact and we make money from their transactions. Our focus is to build world class Farm Management SaaS Platform covering all industries namely :
Empowering Smallholder farmers and all other AgriFood Value Chain with automation and Real-Time Insights.
Connecting Villages. Connecting Farmers
HEADQUARTERS: TANZANIA
Kijitonyama, COSTECH Building,
3rd Floor room 7 & 9
Dar es salaam, Tanzania.
OTHER OFFICES: SOUTH AFRICA
14 Sidar Street Kensington B,
Randburg, Johannesburg 2194.
HQ OFFICES : +255 655 973248
+255620 650 846
SOUTH AFRICA OFFICES : Landline : +27 115 688 204
Mobile: +27 652 206 197
Monday-Friday (9:00 AM - 5:00 PM)
Saturday and Sunday: Off