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Kamotho Njiru is the founder of Nawiri Plant, a start-up that links farmers directly to consumers and finds a market for their produce.

His agribusiness journey started in a very awkward manner, soon after graduating from campus in 2018.

Njiru, a project planning & management graduate, in partnership with his brother, started farming on their 90-acre family land in Naivasha where they planted potatoes. They jumped into the venture even without doing due diligence to find out how to go about the production of the third most important food crop in the world – potato, and the local market needs.

“We planted potatoes and when harvesting time came, we managed to get 100 tonnes of potatoes. However, we knew not where to take them,” he says.

He adds that he was tasked with the responsibility of looking for a market for their produce. “It was tough. I didn’t even know that I had to seek the services of a broker in order to access buyers at the Marikiti market in Nairobi.”

In the end, Njiru says they did not even recover their production costs.

The Wakulima market or ‘Marikiti’ is one of Kenya’s most bustling and vibrant markets, located in Nairobi’s Central Business District (CBD), and it’s a key hub for trading a variety of farm produce.

The market is controlled by middlemen who operate like a pseudo-government by imposing taxes on hapless farmers and traders and end up pocketing millions of shillings every day through coercion and intimidation.

From this experience, Njiru came face to face with the main challenge facing the majority of small-scale farmers in the country.  That’s how, Nawiri Plant, was conceived, to help to help farmers with market intelligence.

The start-up is also helping farmers to understand current market prices, aiding them to keep track of demand trends, and this is enabling them to adjust their production to match market needs.

Various studies have revealed that middlemen in the agricultural supply chain pretend to bridge the gap between small-scale farmers and the consumers but their mode of doing business is a threat to the farmers.

The real profits go to the middlemen who buy up the farm produce at almost giveaway prices and sell at outrageous prices to the consumers. This attitude of middlemen discourages farmers willing to advance their ventures because of the marginal profits associated with the sector as the middlemen cart away the bulk of the profits.

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