Taimba is a Nairobi based Agri-tech company that is transforming the Africa’s agricultural supply chain between rural smallholder farmers and urban traders. Its value proposition is creating direct market linkages for small holder farmers, increasing farmer income by more than 15% and reducing food waste by delivering direct to the traders at lower than market prices. For its next growth phase, the social venture started a cooperation with Enviu and financially supported by the DOEN Foundation.

The 250,000-euro project funding and included project support, enable Taimba to integrate cold logistics within its value chain, to expand its product offering, to optimize its operations and significantly grow its market.

Taimba is unique in offering predictable ready market and better prices to smallholder farmers that account for 90% of Kenya’s total agricultural output.

“We work from the bottom up, looking at the farmer’s needs” stated CEO Dominique Kavuisya. “Formal logistics and markets do exist but currently only cater to large industrial scale farms.” Cold storage and transport will allow Taimba to transport and store a wider range of perishable goods and accommodate a larger lag time between harvesting and sale, leading to greater flexibility and more stable demand for farmers.

“The cold storage solution is important for Taimba to be able to scale up and to grow Taimba’s impact, so it can be an example to innovate and make impact for other companies within the food chain in the region”. Explains Freija Vermeer from Stichting DOEN. “Furthermore, we believe that the co-operation between Taimba and Enviu is an advantage.”

Enviu, through their Rechain program in which it links multiple business interventions to achieve a zero food-loss value chain in East Africa, is supporting Taimba in this ambitious growth phase.

Currently, the journey from farm to store can be anywhere between 5-7 informal brokers with improper equipment, unreliable delivery standards and no price transparency. Through it’s online platform, Taimba works by acting as a direct linkage between smallholder farmers and small scale urban retailers and restaurants. Taimba sources directly from farmer co-operatives by agreeing on an estimated date and price of harvest, then paying farmers on the date of pickup. When a seller needs to request goods they contact Taimba via an app and receive a delivery same of following day.

The increased reliability of this service provides stable demand for farmers, avoiding the existing long waiting times that lead to harvested crops perishing and food waste percentages as high as 40%. Ultimately this stable demand, and reduced waste leads to more money in the farmers’ pockets, as they are able to monetize more of their harvest.

Reducing post-harvest food loss is a double impact goal. As well as improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers Taimba reduces the carbon emissions that stem from food waste.

Reducing food loss results in the ratio of edible food produced to total carbon emitted improving markedly.

Taimba had raised US$ 100K from US based impact investor Gray Matters Capital’s gender lens portfolio coLABS in July last year to strengthen its packhouse infrastructure and expand it’s farmer offerings to include fruits.

For more information, please get in touch with Dominique Kavuisya, CEO of Taimba at dkavuisya@taimba.co.ke  or Paul van der Linden, Venture Builder at Enviu at paul@enviu.org