My week 3 challenge submission
The problem:
As an agripreneur farming commercially in Nigeria, I seen farmers experience the same loss every season. Local farmers grow good tomatoes, peppers, and vegetables, but 40–60% never reaches the market. Produce rots because storage knowledge is weak, cold chain is almost nonexistent, and reliable buyers are hard to reach quickly. Nigeria then imports what we already grow. This is not a production problem. It is a post-harvest and market-linkage failure I deal with on the ground.
Solution
With ₦10 million and a full developer team, I would build HarvestLink — a simple mobile app and WhatsApp platform for the farmers and buyer networks I already work with.
It would:
Deliver clear, location- and crop-specific storage and handling advice in simple language.
Connect farmers directly to nearby buyers, aggregators, and processors.
Help coordinate shared transport and modular cold storage so farmers can pool volumes and cut losses.
We would pilot first in Nigeria, starting with high-waste perishables in two major producing states, using real farmer groups and commercial channels I already operate in. Success would be measured by reduced spoilage and higher farmer income. After proving the model in Nigeria, we would expand to other African markets facing the same post-harvest failure.
₦10 million is enough to build a practical, low-data product, run serious field pilots, and show that the idea works. The goal is simple: stop good food from rotting while the farmers who grew it remain poor.
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