17 Oct 2022

Brastorne Enterprises has gained international recognition for developing a solution that supports smallholder farmers to grow and scale their businesses.

The local company, founded in 2013, has been selected by Heifer International and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Solve 2022 as one of the two winners of the innovation in Smallholder Agriculture Products prize.

In an interview yesterday, Brastorne Enterprises marketing manager, Ms Vanessa Moahi said the Heifer International prize for innovation in smallholder agriculture recognised solutions that supported smallholder farmers, while in the same process protected them from the adverse effects of climate change.

Ms Moahi said Heifer International was a non-profit organisation that aimed to have a lasting impact on addressing poverty and hunger strategically through community development.

She said in the same manner that the average person could often access content through the internet and inform themselves, everybody had that need regardless of social status.

Ms Moahi said it was through such a notion that Brastorne Enterprises realised that even rural people and unconnected communities deserved to be connected, hence the basis of their services.

“Having noticed this, we developed solutions to connect rural people to the power of the internet on the feature mobile phones normally referred to as ‘Sedilame’.

Ms Moahi said this was where their tagline; Connecting the Unconnected came from with the view to connect users not just locally, but across Africa.

She said they started in Botswana, but they aimed to connect every rural poor African to the power of the internet.

She said every year, MIT Solve solicited tech-based solutions to global challenges and chose the most promising that would drive transformational change, citing that this year’s cycle had seen the interest of over 9 600 innovators from 160 countries since 2016, who had submitted solutions for ongoing global challenges.

Brastorne Enterprises began its solver journey in 2021 when it was chosen for the Class of 2021 MIT Solve Team and became the first local company to advance to the final stages.

The Solve Team cohort included over 40 solvers from around the world, with Brastorne Enterprises being the only representative from Botswana, she said.

“Our journey with MIT as a solver team has been truly rewarding, we are so excited to work with Heifer and Solve to expand our impact and mandate of connecting unconnected smallholder farmers in Africa,” she said.

She said MIT Solve, in partnership with Heifer International, had awarded Brastorne approximately P1.6 million to help support them in achieving their goal of connecting the unconnected and to scale solution to make a greater and lasting impact.

Ms Moahi said Brastorne Enterprises had established a significant impact in Africa by Connecting the Unconnected with over 1.8 million users to date, which is a combined user base for Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

She said connectivity was a challenge in Africa, particularly for the less fortunate, who could not afford to buy data bundles or access wi-fi.

Therefore, she said Brastorne Enterprises leveraged simple data protocols (IVR, USSD, SMS) to enable users to connect to the power of the internet over their existing telco networks using their feature phones.

Ms Moahi received the Heifer International prize for its Agri Solution, which seeks to give farmers access to a social community, agricultural advisory services, and markets.

Moreover, she said Brastorne Enterprises was recently selected as one of the 60 beneficiaries of the Google Black Founders Fund Africa 2022 programme and received about P1.2 million.

Brastorne Enterprises is the only organisation from Botswana that has ever participated in the programme and is successfully awarded among a cohort of 10 African countries, she said. ENDS