Isaac Sesi holds the GrainMate moisture meter in Accra, Ghana. Photo: Richard Akakpo
By Sefakor Fekpe, bird history agency
Sesi Technologies, an agricultural technology company, focuses on creating cost-effective technology-driven solutions for farmers. The company’s flagship product, GrainMate, is a grain moisture meter designed to help grain handlers effortlessly measure moisture content, thereby minimizing post-harvest losses.
Isaac Sesi picks up a small bucket of corn to demonstrate the latest iteration of the moisture measuring device. After feeding the device with batteries, he presses a button, bringing up a white screen showing various grain options to test. He selects the corn category and presses another button to start reading. Sesi presents the latest model of the GrainMate moisture meter, a device he developed to combat food loss in rural farming communities.
“Moisture content is one of the physical quantities necessary to determine the quality of your finished product, so we came up with GrainMate to make it easy for you to know how much moisture content you have in your product,” explains Sesi.
As a young man from a farming community in the Ashanti region of Ghana, Sesi learned the challenges of grain storage the hard way, witnessing the difficulties his parents and other farmers faced when trying to store their farm produce. He dedicated his academic career to finding a solution to this food loss.
Its first iteration of the device was completed in 2018. The idea was to help farmers, aggregaters, feed producers and anyone in the grain value chain easily measure the moisture content of their grain before storage, preparation or processing of animal feed.
“One aspect of food security is in the process of being able to reduce or mitigate post-harvest losses because 30% of the food we produce is lost… If we can reduce these losses, that will be good for our food security because the food that goes to waste is food that can feed other people,” says Ceci.
Currently, Sesi Technologies’ GrainMate is less expensive compared to other imported brands of moisture meters.
Sesi’s company offers two models. One is for regular grains, which sells for 800 Ghana cents (about US$65), while a second model extends to high-value products such as shea nuts. This version costs 1,000 Ghana cedis (about US$83).
Sesi graduated from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and used his final year research project to come up with GrainMate.
“In Ghana, with research, you just finish and put it on the shelf to get on with your life, but we thought we developed something really good, so we wanted to make it beneficial for farmers, so I started Sesi Technologies to commercialize the production of my research at KNUST,” says Sesi.
The company’s breakthrough came with the sale of 150 devices. “Sesi Technologies was initially funded through a large pre-order from an international non-profit organization. This gave us the funds we needed to produce our first 150 units and hire our first employee,” the entrepreneur said in an earlier interview.
Since then, Sesi has depended on revenue from sales of moisture meters and other services, while his company has received funding from a number of sources.
“We started with no money, absolutely no money. We have just started trying to commercialize this technology. The way we managed to build our first batch was we got some pre-orders, so we asked the customer to pay 70% so we could use that to fund the initial stock,” he says.
Determined to reach as many farmers as possible, Sesi participated in various start-up support programs. He emerged as the overall winner of the 2019 GoGettaz Agripreneur Award, an award for African agri-food innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions for the agriculture value chain.
“We won the total prize of $50,000.”
This award helped him scale up both production and manpower.
“We have about 25 people in our team and that tells you that our salary every month is significant and we are making progress. We also have our field team responsible for the delivery of services we provide to farmers,” he explains.
Over 5,000 farmers have now tested the device, although uptake has been slower than Sesi and his young team expected. “There’s very slow adoption in new technology, and so we haven’t seen the kind of rapid adoption that we’re looking at.”
However, feedback from the current group of users keeps Ceci and his team motivated.
“For example, poultry farmers use our device to check the moisture content of different feed ingredients before putting it together. When they do that, they tell us that once they know the moisture content, they see that the feed quality is high, the productivity is high, and their birds are disease-free because our device is helping them.”
In an earlier interview with How we made it in Africa, Sesi said his biggest mistake was underestimating how long it would take to build the product. “We were new to building commercial hardware products and didn’t anticipate all the challenges we would face along the way. This led us to overpromise our largest client who had made a huge bet on us. It almost caused our downfall. Now we know better.”
Sesi is optimistic about growth and looks forward to a local manufacturing facility employing skilled engineers to increase production capacity and promote mass adoption of the GrainMate device.
“In the end, the goal is to be able to produce and assemble more,” he says.
/bird history agency