Most fertilizers today are produced in large-scale, capital-intensive units that are mostly located in Europe, China, and the Americas, and then shipped to the emerging markets. Due to the high logistical mark-up, many rural farmers in emerging markets are paying 2-3 times the world price for their fertilizer. Because of their limited income, farmers can often only afford the cheapest, synthetic fertilizer varieties that over the long term actually degrade and acidify their soil. Safi Organics uses technology to downsize and decentralize the fertilizer production process, making it feasible to be implemented profitably in rural villages using locally available resources, labor, and waste. We therefore drastically cut down the logistical cost of conventional fertilizer, and provide farmers access to a higher-quality product. We produce Safi Sarvi, a carbon-negative fertilizer blend that help rural farmers improve their yields by up to 30%.
University: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ricult
The problem of poverty faced by millions of smallholder farmers in developing countries is largely due to financial exclusion. Due to limited cash to pay upfront, these farmers face difficulties in buying farm inputs (seeds, fertilizers, etc.) at the start of a growing season, resulting in exploitation by informal lenders who charge them over 100-150% APR. Ricult solves the problem through providing high-quality farm inputs to farmers on credit at affordable rates, using an innovative risk assessment mobile platform. Creating a tailored credit score for the farmers through applying advanced machine learning technique to nontraditional data sources, we provide loans at five times lower interest rate than money lenders and offer a repayment schedule that matches the crop cycle. Our pilot market is Pakistan where there are over 20 million farmers facing the problem.
Sensen
Many international development organizations strive to improve livelihood around the world by providing products and services to those in need. Organizations rely on field surveys with target communities as the primary form of data collection to uncover the progress of their programs, but these methods are subject to response biases as well as being expensive and time-intensive. Sensen aims to strengthen the reliability of information between international development organizations and the beneficiaries they serve. The Sensen platform provides organizations with a robust and cost-effective solution for monitoring and evaluation to understand usage and performance of products in remote, low-resource settings. The core components of the platform are a cellular-enabled datalogger and a web analytics dashboard. The datalogger attaches to devices to measure, track, and upload information about product usage. This usage data is processed by analytical algorithms and turned into actionable information to support organizational decision-making.
Accelerating Low-to-Moderate Income Customer Inclusion in Community Solar
Solar is booming and the price is lower than ever. Yet, 80% of America is locked out of the rooftop solar market. Solstice radically expands access to clean energy by providing community-shared solar power to underserved American households. This model enables any resident to enjoy clean energy at no upfront cost and save money on their electric bill every year. Our project will put affordable solar in the hands of low- to moderate-income Americans by offering the country’s first short-term community solar contract, by working with trusted community organizations to enroll social networks together and by qualifying customers using metrics other than FICO credit scores (unprecedented in the industry).
Ricult
70% of the world’s poor are smallholder farmers, and they produce 80% of the global food. However, these farmers are poor and food insecure. By 2050, the world will need to produce at least 50% more food to feed 9 billion people. This dual-pronged problem of poverty and food insecurity is caused by 3 main issues in agricultural value chains: supply chain inefficiencies, financial exclusion, and information asymmetry. Ricult is solving these issues by establishing a multi-sided, mobile e-commerce platform that fills the holes in the agricultural supply chain by providing farmers direct access to financial instruments, input sellers, end buyers, logistics providers, and real-time crop information. As 80% of the smallholder farmers have access to mobile phones, Ricult’s solution is accessible through both low cost feature phones without Internet connections and smartphones.
Safi Organics
Safi Organics produces a carbon-negative soil conditioner derived from biomass (farm) waste. Designed for rural smallholder farmers, the soil conditioner leads to a 30% increase in crop yield and 50% increase in income by reversing soil degradation. Biomass waste is present in most rural farms every year after harvest, and yet most of this waste is burned in open air rather than economically utilized because existing capital-intensive and centralized processing technologies often require the long-distance transport of this waste, which is very expensive. Safi Organics has developed patent- pending environmentally-friendly reactors and unique recipes that enable the low-cost and decentralized conversion of waste into carbon-negative soil conditioner in under 2 hours. The company’s EcoCert-certified product is currently used in more than 80 acres of land in Safi Organics’ preliminary pilot project and has generated highly positive customer reviews. In addition, this product actively sequesters 1.5 tons of CO2 per acre into the soil each planting season thereby directly mitigating climate change.