What do African smallholder farmers need? No one truly knows. No one that we know of has ever asked more than 1,000 (of the hundreds of millions) what they think they need.
Recorded live at Africa Eats’ 2026 Annual Gathering. This is a discussion between Africa Eats’ co-founders Luni Libes and Jumaane Tafawa with the founders of the bizi. A glimpse into the internal-only Day 2 activities of that event.
0:00 Somewhere you have some records of the names of every one of these farmers because they have your animals like you own the animal stuff. Yeah. So you know their names, you know where they are.
0:10 Uh how do you actually, what is the definition of where their farm is? Like how do you define that definition?
0:20 Latitude and longitude, Google dot address? Like what, I don’t know. What I do know right now is I’m living in a place in Nairobi, Kenya that doesn’t have a street address. And I was living in a lovely house in Mauritius that didn’t have a street address. It had a name, like literally to mail, to send postage to that house in Mauritius, you tell the post office the name of the house and they just know where that is.
0:49 Okay. So, how do you how do you tell where a farmer is?
0:52 We have two types of farmers. The first farmer people, the 3,000 farmers whom we work with who have our animals. Yeah. Those ones we know, in Rwanda we have like administration, cell, their village, and their sector, and their yeah, their street.
1:18 Okay.
1:19 Yeah, we and we group those people into a group of 50 people, and then those 50 people we can know each other, their households and their street, their cell, their village, and each one has what we call a farmer book.
1:37 From your records, if one of your workers pulled out the record for a farmer and went to that sector and that street and that whatnot, would they, without asking anyone in the village, would they be able to point to the house where the person lives?
1:52 Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Um, would you have in your records the size of their farm?
1:59 Those ones, the one with pigs, we know the number of pigs they have in their farms.
2:04 But you don’t know the size of their farm. You don’t know what else they’re… only for chicken farmers, that one we know the size of their, okay, of their farms because according to the size of their farms we know how many chicken they can order and how many…
2:20 Do you know how much money you paid each one last year?
2:25 Uh, no, I don’t know.
2:26 Do, and you don’t know how much money they earned in cash, just you don’t know their income from last year.
2:33 Uh, I know the average per farmer. Okay. Yeah. Last year we’ve paid up to $85 per farmer.
2:43 Hand it to George here. How many farmers are growing turkeys for Polei?
2:51 Um, we have about 300 farmers.
2:54 About or exactly?
2:57 Not exactly.
2:58 Somewhere there’s a list of every single farmer. Yes, yes, and their names. And their names.
3:04 And do you just know where they live or do you have a record of like their address?
3:11 Um, yeah, we normally, like what we do is we don’t go to all the 300 farmers directly. We allocate them in groups. Okay. Yes. So we deal directly with the group leaders, and the group leaders give the feedback to the farmers. Okay. Okay. So, you know the group leaders, but do you have the names of the individual farmers?
3:34 Yes.
3:34 Do you know the size of their farms?
3:36 Uh, most of our farmers do homestead, right? Yes. But do you know how big that is in hectares or acres? It’s not, it’s not more than…
3:49 And do you know what else they’re growing on their property besides turkeys?
3:52 Yes. Uh, most of them do maize and groundnuts.
3:55 Do you know anecdotally what they’re growing or do you have in your records that this farmer is doing soy this year and this farmer is doing maize and this farmer is doing sorghum?
4:06 Yes, we get those records using the leaders we deploy in the different areas. Okay. Uh, do you know how many turkeys they have? You know how many turkeys they bought?
4:17 I can’t give a specific number, but I can give an average.
4:20 But is it in your records?
4:22 Yes, yes. Okay.
4:23 Let’s try, let’s try the next one over. That’s right. So yours is different though, right? So you’re not collecting from the same farmers every single season, right?
4:33 Of course.
4:34 So how many farmers did you collect from last season?
4:38 Uh, about 500 less.
4:41 And what do you know about the farmers besides how much honey you paid for?
4:48 We know they own about two to five hives on average. Of course, we have outliers who can own 10, 20, but on average it’s two to five hives. Um, we pay them an average of $30 to $50.
5:05 How many chickens on average do they own?
5:09 Well, not anecdotally. So, just I would just be clear like…
5:13 We don’t have that data.
5:14 You don’t have that data. That’s the answer I want. Okay. And how much, what was their yield of their maize per acre last season?
5:21 No idea. We want to focus on honey. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay.
5:25 Um let’s try Paul. So do you actually go out, they bring you the goats or you go out to get their goats?
5:34 So it’s a combination of both. Uh, they bring the goats, we also aggregate from their side.
5:39 Do you know anything about their farming besides goats?
5:43 Yes, we know. But to date we have not taken a step to document that in our records. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
5:49 Does anybody else have any more detailed, you know, more detail on the milk, the mad cows? I heard you rant about mad cows. Um, so the one company in the… Oh, okay. Go ahead.
6:10 Okay. So, I only have the data for the last two months and it shows their, the collection. So I have two different types of data. You know, I’m sure this goes to all of us. We have those that we’re dealing directly with the farmers and with those we’re dealing with the aggregators because some farmers are really hard to meet them. So the aggregators help us do that job. So on average, according to the data I have, it’s for the last two months because that’s when I started doing a personal followup for the data within the farmers and within the aggregators.
6:45 For the aggregators, do they, do you know how many farmers they’re aggregating from or is that again, no idea?
6:51 It’s opaque. Yeah.
6:52 Joseph’s not here. I wanted Joseph was in the…
6:56 He’s on a call in the back.
6:58 Um, because he’s working with a lot of aggregators too. Uh yeah, we heard this from Haika. One of the patterns that we’re seeing is five years ago, there were some group stuff, but most of the time people would just tell us exactly how many farmers they were working with. And there wasn’t much to this working with aggregators. The bizi were generally too small to work with aggregators. They were the aggregators. And now the bizi are getting big enough that a lot of the food is coming from aggregators, not coming directly from farmers.
7:27 And so again, back to my stories, I used to publish, we used to ask you how many farmers you worked with and we published that number, and then we noticed that that number kind of stopped growing, and then we really got that answer from Haika which is yeah, we don’t do farmers as much, we just do aggregators. Um, and so we don’t know a lot about the people growing the food that we’re selling.
7:53 Part of, there’s a few reasons why I think this is important. Um, one reason is that we don’t know what they need. So, we know how much honey they, or how many hives they have, or how many chickens or pigs they have, or how many turkeys they have, but we don’t know what else they’re doing. We don’t know what else they’re growing. And therefore, we don’t know what else we could be providing to these farmers.
8:19 So I think we’re actually leaving a huge opportunity on the table is that we reach collectively this group of bizi, we reach probably a half a million farmers, if not a million farmers. I don’t know. The last time we had a count, it was roughly 200,000 and that was like three years ago, and we’ve added, you know, 15 million in revenue, although a lot of it’s trucking. And so we have zero idea how many farmers we reach from the customers of TRUK, like that’s another layer beyond aggregator. So let’s put that one aside. Um, from the rest of the companies, we’re probably reaching a half a million farmers. It’s a lot of farmers.
9:01 There’s probably things that they want, but we just don’t know what it is. And the problem that I have on my end is I’m again, I’m like TRUK, I’m one step away. I have zero farmers that I’m working with. Zero. Africa Eats doesn’t buy from many farmers. We invest in companies that buy from farmers and aggregators. Uh, and so I’ve been asking GIZ and some of the others, development organizations, can we get a grant? Can we get a grant to find out what the farmers want?
9:35 Like, oh sorry, the way I approach this is do you guys know what a million farmers in Africa want and need? Like, do you know what their struggles are? Do you know what their challenges are? And the answer is always no. The answer sometimes, yeah we do a little bit of surveying, but the answer is nobody knows what a million farmers want today. Nobody knows what the income was of a million farmers last year. Nobody has that data.
10:04 And so I asked GIZ last year, can we get a grant so we can figure this out? Like, we would then have the Tuesday team build an app in 20 languages or 30 languages to go ask, like to get this app through you guys to the farmers through the aggregators to the farmers so we can ask them what they need. Like, that’s how my… I have a long list of things I would love to do. That’s one of the things I’d love to do.
10:31 Um, we have, uh actually we have two of our co-investors paid for surveys of farmers. So Global Partnerships paid for a study of potato farmers who work at, who work for EAF or sell to EAF in Tanzania, and they surveyed 245 potato farmers. That survey cost like probably $50,000–$60,000, and we have a one-time snapshot of what those farmers’ lives were like. And then somebody else paid for a similar study at Agro Supply and did a study of these farmers buying seeds, and it was like 200 and something farmers.
11:20 Again, Joseph at Agro Supply, because of his business, he has a database of every one of his customers. So, every farmer he works with gets a number. And if you watch the videos that he put out, they actually know their number. I find that to be interesting. So, I’m farmer number 492 or I’m farmer number 5,823. Uh, he has 37,000 farmers that he works with. So the database has about 50,000 farmers in it.
11:49 He knows their name. He knows their location. He knows the size of their farm. And this is all for his business. He knows the size of their farm, he knows their income last year, he knows their income this year, he knows what they planted in the ground, which variety it was, and the yield. Um, and this is all, the reason he does that is because it’s related to the business of selling seeds. But it’s an incredible database of here’s what farmers can do, here’s what farmers’ income is like.
12:19 What it’s not tracking though is, well, how many chickens do they have? And did they have any income from the chickens? How many pigs do they have? And do they have any income from the pigs? Is there any other business that they’re doing? It’s missing all of that, and it would be lovely to have. So, I just wanted this little segment, which I just shortened down, just to get some information of what you have. And what I’m hearing is you have as little, you have only the minimum information you need.
12:43 Um, and my challenge out to you guys for the coming year here is, can you get any other information? And if so, what do those farmers need? Yeah, I’ll bet you they need something other than you buying honey or something other than turkeys.
13:03 Let me ask the same question a different way. How many of you would like to get more information on your farmers and how they’re doing that you think would benefit your own business? Just put up your hands. Okay, so you would like to get more information. Okay.
13:16 The reason I asked that question is we’re finding more and more that getting that kind of data is going to be critical. So, one for example, and you know, Joseph from Swani can speak to this from exports. Um, I think there are like laws in Europe now that require that any company in Europe that buys anything from across the value chain globally, they have to be able to report out on is there child labor happening on that specific farm. Is there environmental damage happening there? And if so, or if there is, then the European company would be fined. So they now have to start to look down at their entire value chain. That’s one.13:56 The other one I’ll mention is um for IFRS, there’s a sustainability reporting requirement that’s coming up. It’s called S1 and S2. They’ve been shopping it around globally and it’s going to become mandatory at some point. But it requires you to report out on if you’re sourcing from farmers, then what’s happening there. And if you don’t have that data, you have to collect it and then start reporting it. If you don’t, the audit firm will then write on your audit that you don’t have that information, and then that would actually then, when investors look, that’s something they’ll be looking at. So it’s going to be helpful for us, but it’s also going to be critical for you to be able to also collect this. So I think it’s in everybody’s interest. That’s why I wanted to emphasize for us to start moving in that direction. It will take time and effort and energy, etc. But it is something that will become mandatory in some form for all of us.
