Young Ghanaian Engineer Designed a Machine That Helps Rural Farmers + Keeps Students In Classrooms with Jeffrey Appiagyei S2 Ep.10
Jeffrey Boakye Appiagyei is a young Ghanaian agriculture and biosystems engineer, ag-tech entrepreneur, and co-founder of SayeTech an agricultural manufacturing company in Ghana. As a student at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, he developed his design and fabrication skills that he applied to portable soybean threshers, solar evaporative cooling units for fruits and vegetables, and vibrating seed cleaners. During his youth service as an elementary teacher in a rural community in Northern Ghana, he noticed student absenteeism was high during the harvest season when parents usually remove children from class time to help with the harvest. His solution to the problem was to use his technical design skills with his co-founder to make machines that help farmers with post-harvest processing, improve post-harvest losses and help students stay in school throughout the school year.
Key interview highlights:
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- Necessity IS the mother of invention, at least in the SAYeTECH case. The need to reduce school attrition rates for students in Northern Ghana during the harvest season led Jeffrey and his co-founder to build local mechanized solutions placed in rural areas to help reduce drudgery for smallholder farmers and their families. A byproduct of the SAYeTECH mechanized harvesting machines is reduced post-harvest loss. Mechanization allows farmers to preserve more of their production and fetch premium prices on the market. \n
- Machines installed in 32 rural communities throughout Ghana create jobs and a circular economy in rural areas around the installation of the machines that helps to stem rural-urban migration You might have to change your initial business/product idea after you launch based on customer behavior and continue to innovate to ensure that you are meeting customer needs. \n
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