Five groundbreaking young African tech innovators you should know

Isaac Sesi

Ghanaian, 2020 FINALIST (with his team)

Smallholder farmers in Ghana lose up to 30% of their grain due to incorrect moisture levels. This moisture can cause mould, attract insects, and reduce the grain quality, all of which lead to loss of revenue. Most smallholder farmers can’t afford the expensive moisture meters on the market and resort to crude testing methods, such as biting the grain or throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks.

Sesi’s innovation – the GrainMate – seeks to solve this problem of post-harvest losses. GrainMate is a simple, handheld meter which accurately measures the moisture content of grains. Sesi, an electrical engineer, developed GrainMate after he was invited to lead a research project into grain moisture meters. GrainMate can currently test sorghum, millet, hard and soft wheat, chickpeas, corn, rice, soybean and groundnuts. The handheld display, which only has three buttons, was designed to be intuitive for farmers with little education and low literacy levels.

As of 2020, around 800 farmers were already using 300 GrainMates, and Sesi is developing a Bluetooth-enabled model to link to a smartphone to provide data analysis to commercial farmers and warehouses. The easy-to-use aluminium probe is simply inserted into a bag of grain. The tip of the probe contains temperature and humidity sensors, which take an average reading of the whole bag to provide a moisture reading. The reading is then displayed on a detachable handheld unit after two to three minutes.