Posted on May, 27, 2021 at 07:41 am
Dar es Salaam — Meet Evodius Rutta, a PhD student who left an otherwise promising career in International Development to start an agricultural innovation hub that mentors local engineers to develop low-cost, postharvest technologies, and provide services to small-scale farmers in Tanzania.
Mr Rutta is a former employee of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) who worked in wildlife conservation, and the German International Development Agency 'GIZ,' working on agriculture and international development.
Almost a decade later, he decided to establish a post-harvest innovation centre in Morogoro Region in 2019 with the aim of containing postharvest crop losses that are experienced by smallholder farmers in Tanzania as a matter of course.
"After doing some research, we realised one thing that our farmers are experiencing huge crop losses mainly because there is lack of post-harvest facilities, including storage facilities," the cofounder of MavunoLab says.
"Available solutions in the market to solve this problem are not affordable to smallholder farmers, many of whom can hardly meet their day-to-day needs," he said.
According to him, farmers - especially smallholders - fail to access post-harvest technologies because they are expensive, with most of them having to be imported.
Besides, he says a number of imported post-harvest facilities do not have the capacity to preserve our crops in Tanzania.
"To overcome such challenges, our mission is to train graduate engineers and in-school engineers with potential products, technology or ideas to solve the postharvest losses experienced by small-scale farmers in Tanzania.
"After we recruit you, our team will assess your product and if we are convinced of the product you have, you join the MavunoLab programmes for mentorship, further research and development of your product.
"Currently, we are focusing on developing solutions for perishable commodities such as tomatoes, about 40-to-50 percent of which are lost before they reach consumers," he laments. "It is very sad that, for many years now, the government has been advocating - and even investing heavily in - increasing food production. But, it has been overlooking the postharvest crop losses problem.
"The majority of farmers in Tanzania lack proper knowledge on managing their crops after harvest. In fact, they continue to use traditional food handling practices that cause significant food losses. Our innovation centre seeks to address this problem through postharvest management training for farmers across Tanzania," Mr Rutta says.
"We are currently working with five young engineers who have the potential for postharvest innovations for cassava and other perishable crops. Both the innovations are in the early stages of development, and our goal is to make them marketable and profitable in the next few years.
He also said that since they established MavunoLab, they have partnered with several local and foreign companies in the agricultural value-chain space.
"At the moment, we are in discussion with an Indian company that manufacturers postharvest technologies to find any opportunities for collaboration between young Indian and Tanzanian engineers in product development.
"This will help our engineers to learn how Indian engineers utilize their skills to mitigate post-harvest losses. After all, engineers in countries like India and Canada were doing well in the creation of innovations, compared to our local engineers," he said.
The young man is currently in the final year of his PhD Studies at Queen's University, Ontario, Canada. He is looking forward to collaborating and working with the government of Tanzania, as well as private sector and agribusiness companies in finding sustainable solutions to end post-harvest losses in the country.
According to an earlier report, there are over 50 million people with an average annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 6-7 percent over the past decade.
Agricultural development is key to attaining the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and is the mainstay of the economy, contributing over 27 percent of GDP and engaging an estimated 78 percent of the working population. Tanzania is largely self-sufficient in its main staple crop, maize, although it still faces shortfalls in some years due to vagaries of the weather.
Smallholder farmers in Tanzania face a raft of challenges, including obtaining and paying for quality seeds, fertilizer and pesticide, as well as transporting goods to market along run-down road networks.
Compounding this is the lack of post-harvest storage facilities for crops - and, if available, their costs border on the prohibitive. Both the public and private sectors in Tanzania have made significant investments in the country's financial infrastructure in recent years. But, the provision of credit, insurance cover and payments facilities for smallholders is still significantly lacking.
Mobile money products and services are a powerful tool to bring the unbanked and those using only informal financial services into the formal economic sector.
They transform a mobile 'phone from a communications tool into a channel for low-cost financial services such as payments, transfers, insurance, credit and savings.
Mobile money is established and maturing in Tanzania overall, serving new business areas and enabling a wider range of digital payments - including among some smallholder households.
Source: The Citizen