Spotlight

Jeffrey Boakye Appiagyei

Jeffrey Boakye Appiagyei

SAYeTECH Company

SAYeTECH is a high-impact agritech start-up locally building and delivering smart small agricultural machines to serve underserved smallholder farmers reducing their losses and helping farmers produce more. At SAYeTECH, we design, manufacture and provide farming services for smallholder farmers using our agricultural machines. SAYeTECH, recognizes the need to play a role in boosting the agricultural sector in our part of the world and is committed to providing sustainable agricultural solutions that meet high standards of sustainability and profitability all the while, eradicating poverty and creating employment for the local youth.

  • SAYeTECH’s vision is to create an ecosystem that thrives on user-centred-agricultural solutions for Africa to create jobs for the youth and contribute to ending hunger and poverty in Africa.
    • SAYeTECH’s Mission is to;
      1.Introduce climate-smart machines/solutions to increase farmers' productivity and lower food losses.
      2. Eliminate human drudgery in food production to ensure there is no child-labour in farming
      3. Improve the quality of farm produce.
      4. Create decent (new) manufacturing and service jobs (especially for the youth) in the manufacturing of machinery and food productions.
      5. Increase smallholder farmers’ access to efficient agriculture machinery by 8% within 5-7 years and by that increase their productivity in the countries we work in.
      6. Lower the cost of food production in Ghana and Africa at large to help create a food secured Africa.
      7. Encourage youth involvement in agriculture by leveraging smart digital mechanisation solutions.
    ...

    Jeffrey's undying desire to make a difference in his community inspired him to participate in five hand-built projects (4 non-scoring) while in school, which includes a vibrating seed cleaner, design and fabrication of a soybean thresher, a groundnut pod splitter, and the design of a solar evaporative cooling unit for fruits and vegetables storage. It was during this venture that Jeffrey met SIL. Jeffrey saw a flyer in his department that advertised SIL’s need for small-sized soybean thresher designers and decided to rise to the occasion. His interest was piqued mainly because the flyer mentioned that these threshers were for women in the Northern region of Ghana and other parts of Africa, where he had spent the majority of his vacations reaching out to farmers. Jeffrey brought together a team to work on the project and the rest made history. They emerged as winners of the program and he got the opportunity to join the SIL thresher team. After graduation, Jeffrey served for a year as an elementary teacher and mentor in a rural community without electricity in Northern Ghana. During that year, he assisted in raising funds for the construction of a solar-powered library that serves over 900 pupils in seven communities. He observed during his year there that parents usually came for their children during class hours to thresh their grain in the harvest season. This greatly disheartened him and he decided manufacturing machines locally would be extremely beneficial to students in areas like these across Africa. Jeffrey convinced his co-founder. Mr. Theodore Ohene Botchway to join him in this endeavour and they began designing machines that could solve the problem. Their team became bigger with a few more resourceful additions and they set up the company SAYeTECH in 2018.

      Using a human-centred design approach, our machines are robust with durable materials. We have in stock the designs and the following,
      1. Multi-Crop Thresher
      2. 4/6 - Tonnes Cereal Dryer
      3. Hammer Mills for Poultry Feed Processing
      4. Cereal Grain Cleaner
      5. Cocoa pod breaker

    The ST6000 multi-crop threshers which is SAYeTECH’s flagship have proven to increase the income of farmers by up to 50% due to the premium prices they receive from their grains after using our machines. Grains processed with our threshers come out cleaner with no breakages, devoid of dust and stones and are of the highest quality, making them healthy, nutritious and also highly sought after. SAYeTECH’s machines reduce food loss in grains from about 30% which is usually the case when manual threshing is used to less than 3% and has helped save 648 tonnes of grains (US$ 199440+) which would have otherwise been lost through food losses and emitted close to 1600 tons of carbon. The ST-6000 threshes crops 6000 times faster than manual threshing, reducing the normal threshing time from 2 weeks to 2 hours per acre. The promptness of SAYeTECH’s machines reduces devastating losses through bush fires, pest attacks, rodents and bad weather during harvest. A single multi-crop thresher provides employment for three young people as thresher operators. This helps curb rural urban migration since our machines provide jobs for young people in rural communities in Ghana. Also, SAYeTECH sources its raw materials locally and also subcontracts many of our parts manufacturing providing jobs to 18 local businesses and growing the capacity of local manufacturing in Ghana so far. Till date, SAYeTECH has manufactured 60 multi crop threshers which have in-turn directly provided jobs for 200+ young people both males and females. SAYeTECH has also been able to save over 6500 women and children from threshing related drudgery, as well as saved 120,320+ school going days for over 2300 school going children. This is because parents sacrificed the education of their children to work on farms without our thresher. The ST-6000 is energy efficient and uses 400% less fuel than tractor powered threshers, thereby contributing to the reduction of carbon emission into the environment for the same work done. The small lightweight nature of our machines helps avoid soil compaction and improves farm mobility unlike other huge equipment in the market. SAYeTECH uses up to 1 ton of recycled metal (40%) per 5 machines to produce and recycle older machines after their lifespan. The smart-ware functions of the thresher enable us to collect relevant agricultural data to help advice policy and connect farmers to premium markets. SAYeTECH has received product enquiries from 17 countries across the world and is currently scaling up in Kenya and working towards scaling up in other African countries including, Nigeria, Burundi, Zambia, Morocco and Tanzania. Having researched into the market and the smallholder farmer's needs, we are scaling up direct threshing services to smallholder farmers in rural communities in Ghana and other African countries starting in 2021. We began pilots in 2020, and the results have been great so far with some key institutions approaching us for threshing services.