Many African societies, agriculture remains the backbone for
the societies because people have got to eat.
But as the land gets smaller, less arable land is available.
We need to figure out how to make this work.
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My name is Frank Omondi, I am the CEO of Ten Senses Africa.
Ten Senses Africa is a macadamia processing business in Nairobi.
Macadamia is very rare.
Actually it almost less than 3% of the world tree nut production.
You start getting a harvest after three years.
And the good thing about it, it's a pension tree.
As it grows older you get more product then you have to just wait then it falls
when it's ready.
So you just pick it up and take it to the market.
We work with smallholders who has really farmers with small pieces of land and
they grow these macadamia trees for us.
So we work with them, train them, give them seedlings and
then we buy the product from them.
And we process the product in a big factory in Nairobi.
And all this product is exported to the US and Europe.
Ten years ago we set it up as a company that is going to be fair to farmers.
We found smallholders were being taken advantage of.
We had a middleman who comes and buys a product at a lower price,
keeps the product and sells it to the processor maybe three times the price.
And nothing goes back to the farmer.
Smallholder farmer needs guaranteed market, which they normally don't get.
But Ten Senses decided to have long term relations with this farmers.
And we commit to buy all their product.
We give our farmers fair prices, and we provide contracts for
them, we built our own software.
And on the software we're able to track farmer product,
we're able to pay farmers directly on mobile phones, instantly.
Each person can move nearly $2,000 to $3,000 on their phone.
You don't get that anywhere else.
And we have traceability is in the software, our bags from the farms,
they have a tag on it and we can trace that product from the farm to the shelf.
I got into this business at a point in my life when I was changing careers and
worked for government at that time for three years.
And then I have this opportunity to work for
a wildlife charity which is a fancy job.
At this point, Ten Senses was available on offer.
The company was nearly bankrupt.
For some reason, we got in and decided to grow the business.
It was a difficult journey.
So it's been business, business all the way.
And every time I look at business,
I look at business in a way that helps uplift more people.
>> I have something because of Ten Senses.
My family is feeding through Ten Senses.
My children are learning from Ten Senses.
I'm a mother of four.
>> I think the future of Africa's food production lies in the hands of
the smallholders.
Our country has challenges with the climate today.
And it's even becoming difficult to predict the rains because we've
cut most of our trees.
And we feel having macadamia and cashew trees seedlings into the hands of farmers.
We're not only helping these vulnerable farmers to get income but
also giving them climate change resiliency.
I'm not business trained, am a wildlife biologist.
And so to get a wildlife biologist to run a complex expert business, requires skill.
I was looking for an MBA program for myself and I was on Twitter and
I saw the Stanford Seed link.
I went into it.
I felt very excited about it and I just jumped in.
We've doubled our sales, since the Stanford Seed program.
We've also been able to raise funds.
We just closing in 4 million now, it is exciting for us.
We employ a lot of people, about 600 people now.
And we could easily, in next ten years, get into 3,000 people.
We are working with 30,000 farmers.
We are now one of the largest suppliers of seedlings.
So we're looking at impacting 100,000 farmers directly in the next ten years.
I see Africa as a next frontier for
producing food, producing excellent products from agriculture,
providing employment and as well as providing organic products.
We may never beat China or America on making motor vehicles.
But we can beat them producing food and macadamias.
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