A Self Help Africa social enterprise that works to secure a fair price for African farmers produce has received a prestigious award from a US-based programme that champions innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.

TruTrade’s market-linkage service has received the honour for its use of a unique mobile phone enabled trading and payment platforms that is supporting small-scale farmers, particularly women, to market and sell their produce.

TruTrade was selected from amongst nearly 1,000 entries spanning 103 different countries, when it was chosen as one of seven winners in the ‘Women and Technology’ category at the recently held ‘Solve Challenge.’

“This is a really exciting development for TruTrade,” said CEO Ray Jordan. “It recognizes the clear potential we have to make a truly significant impact on rural poverty. At TruTrade we’re now really beginning to see success with the mobile trading platform that we have developed.”

“In recent months, 93% of all payments to farmers for their crops have been made through mobile money, and in some value chains we’re seeing over 100% premiums being paid for these crops. The MIT award opens up the potential to scale this really promising model to new value chains and new countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa.”

The innovation and quality of Self Help Africa’s work has been recognized on several occasions in the recent weeks. In Uganda, our MANZO Youth project, supporting young entrepreneurs in Uganda, was shortlisted for the Saville Foundation Pan-African Awards for Entrepreneurship in Education 2017, while In Ireland, Dochas, the representative organisation of NGOs has shortlisted a ‘Two Villages’ multimedia in their annual awards for 2017.

Photo: TruTrade director Will Galvin (third from left) with MIT Solve judging co-chair, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi (center) and other Solve award winners.