James Kapombe inspecting a machine used to extract coconut husks during installation of the machine at Matiakani, Kilifi County. Photo courtesy.

At 26, James Kapombe Kasemo,  is the founder  and CEO of CocoGrow, a company he started at the beginning of last year to manufacture coco peat, a soilless growing medium for different horticulture crops. This is after expensively buying the medium before a long waiting for delivery from dealers who imported the product.

Upon graduating from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) with Bsc. Actuarial Science in 2014 Kapombe started commercial tomato farming under Casemo Foods, a company which deals in production of various crops in Matiakani, Kilifi County.

The company used to buy coco peat made from coconut husks to germinate and grow tomatoes from dealers who imported the medium from Sri Lanka.

“I could buy the medium at between Sh800 and Sh900 and most of the time I placed orders I was forced to wait for at least two weeks to receive the product. This was expensive and time wasting for our production and market time,” said Kapombe.

The company has been producing the crops until June 2016 when he started conducting a research on coco peats production having driven by curiosity and passion in agribusiness.

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He wondered how farmers especially from his region could lack healthy planting materials in fear of expensively buying coco peat produced from coconut by-products which the residents burn as waste material.

“The medium offer 100 per cent seed germination as compared to soil and it has high water and nutrient retention capacity of up to 10 times, while also providing optimum aeration for the plants,” said Kapombe.

According to 2003 Philippine Coconut Authority research on utilization of coco peat on coconut production, coco peat is a 100 per cent renewable organic resource for soilless growth medium with 70 per cent water holding capacity and gradually release nutrients to the plant roots due to its alkalinity.

Driven by these benefits and his dream of producing locally available and cheap growing medium for farmers, Kapombe after a successful research decided to rebrand Casemo Foods to CocoGrow in June last year and proceeded to spend his over Sh800,000 savings to establish the company temporarily at Mariakani Town.

“Starting off this company has never been easy. We have been facing electricity problem which has even hindered our movement to a better and bigger operation place within the county.” Said the CEO.

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To officially kick off production in large quantities, the company received production certificate from Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) last month and has since been producing two tonnes per day.

They have further decided to reduce production costs by contracting local engineers who fabricates their production machines instead of importing.

“We love promoting local skills, so we have chosen to hire local experts to make our production machines thus saving us time and money as compared to if we were to import them.”

CocoGrow does their product packaging in a 30 kilogram bags and selling a kilo at Sh33 minus VAT. The company sells the products to traders and farmers in Kericho, Bungoma, Thika, Nairobi and Coastal region among other places on order.

“We have already created a strong customer base in many regions in Kenya owing the value of our product. This has been achieved by attending agricultural events and exhibitions to showcase the product,” said Kapombe.

“On 6-8 last month we attended International Flower Trade and Expo at Oshwal Centre in Nairobi and we are glad that our product received a wide range of acceptance by prospective customers.”

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The company has two permanent employees and six other on a casual basis to help in the daily operations of the company of extracting the long fibres from the coconut husks to realis the coco peats.

“Our products are purely from coconut husks which are high-quality raw materials sourced from our local traders,” said Kapombe.

So far CocoGrow has been featured among the 15 Most Promising Startups at this year’s Nairobi Innovation Week, 2017 Winner Agribusiness Category by E4Impact Foundation and featured in Unleash Innovation Lab, Denmark the same year.

Kapombe is currently on part time pursuing his MBA in Global Business Sustainability and Social Entrepreneurship at Tangaza College in collaboration with Catholic University of Milan.

Before starting a mattress plant using the same coconut by-products, he hopes to move the company to be the leading producer of growing medium in Africa and improve sustainable production in food systems.

“By 2050 Africa will have a doubled population index, and given the average age of an African farmer is 60, we need to seek new ways of crop production and make farming cool for the youth” said Kapombe.

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Kapombe can be reached on +254 727 977175.

A good number of youth especially in Africa find it difficult to venture in agriculture due traditional ways of farming which require tough manual labour and offer low wages. To make the industry look appealing to this new generations who generally prefer to try their luck finding jobs in cities, there are new key digital innovations in the sector to make work easy for the youth and smallholder farmers in Africa.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over 60 per cent of its 1.2 billion population is under the age of 25. This growing youth population needs fruitful employment, and food and agriculture, perhaps re-conceptualized, have the potential to offer this to the youth.

There are already new ways of working in agriculture that harnesses digital and technological innovations, rendering it more efficient and, not as a small byproduct, providing new opportunities and services for young entrepreneurs.

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Here are 5 examples of how harnessing the power of digital technology can revolutionize agriculture:

Fall Armyworm Monitoring and Early Warning System (FAMEWS) App - Fall Armyworm is a devastating pest destroying maize and other important crops across parts of the Americas, Africa and Asia.Only farmers in their fields can successfully manage FAW. That is why FAO has developed a tool to capture data uploaded by farmers in their fields. The information added to the app is transferred to a global web-based platform and analysed to give real-time situation reports, calculate infestation levels and suggest measures to reduce impact.

Nuru App – Along with FAMEWS, FAO and the Pennsylvania State University have developed a complementary, talking app called Nuru that, when held next to a damaged plant, can immediately confirm if Fall Armyworm has caused the damage. Nuru combines machine learning and artificial intelligence. It runs inside a standard Android phone and can also work offline. In addition to English, Nuru will also soon be able to speak French, Swahili and Twi and it is learning new languages all the time to better reach farmers in their own tongues. Nuru will soon be linked to FAMEWS, where all the data will be validated by national Fall Armyworm focal points and stored in a global web-based platform.

Abalobi App - Abalobu, which is Xhosa for “fisherfolk”, is a mobile application for small-scale fishers to record what they caught, when, where, using what method and for how much they sold it. All that information is stored in the app and made available to other small-scale fishers. There are currently 30 000 artisanal fishers along South Africa's coastline living off of the sea, on a thin line between commercial and subsistence fishing. By producing their own knowledge on fishing, they are helping to build resilient communities, especially in the face of climate change.

Drones – Some estimates suggest that the food and agriculture sector will be the second largest user of drones in the world in the next five years. FAO has already utilized drones in many countries to collect real-time, in-depth data on food and agricultural challenges such as risk of natural disasters and assessment of damages after them.

Agricultural Services Apps - Four new apps are providing farmers with real-time services through information on weather, livestock care, markets and nutrition. The weather and crop calendar app combines information on weather forecasts and crop schedules, providing early warning of potential risks. The cure and feed your livestock app helps reduce losses by providing information on animal disease control and animal feeding strategies. AgriMarketplace enables farmers to obtain better information about suppliers for raw material purchases, marketplaces to sell their products and market prices. e-Nutrifood gives rural people recommendations on producing, conserving and eating nutritious foods.

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The youth are just the ones to offer new ideas. During the #HackagainstHunger event this week in Kigali, Rwanda, FAO and its partners are engaging young people from different countries in Africa to find innovative solutions that address challenges in food and agriculture. These Hackathons aim to develop ideas into tech solutions to produce youth-led and youth-focused employment opportunities while offering mentorship from private and public sector experts.

Digital technologies are already our present and innovation is imperative for the future. New ideas from our youth and from organizations, universities and companies all over the world are helping to unlock the potential of food and agriculture for reducing poverty, to bridge the rural divide, to employ and empower youth and to give equal access to information, technology and markets.

FAO is creating and promoting these innovative solutions to address the ever-dire challenges facing our future of food and agriculture.

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