Tanzania

In collaboration with WFP’s Munich Innovation Accelerator, the Innovation Hub is delivering a two-year scale-up support program to Sanku funded by the Bill and Melinda Foundation. Sanku provides fortification tools, training and technical support to small-scale flour mills, enabling them to fortify their flour with essential micronutrients. The company developed a cellular-connected micronutrient dosifier, and through its innovative business model enables millers to purchase nutrients together with customised flour bags at no additional cost. 

The Scale-up funding and technical support will enable Sanku to expand their miller reach in Tanzania, enter new markets in East Africa, and develop and test micronutrient dosifiers for small-scale rice fortification. 

Imara Tech is a Tanzania-based social enterprise that manufactures agricultural equipment for smallholder farmers. Their current flagship product is a portable multi-crop threshing machine that is 75x faster than manual methods. Imara Tech markets their products to rural entrepreneurs, who in turn offer mechanisation services to smallholder farmers at affordable rates. With their participation in the sprint programme funded by the Innovation Accelerator, they will be testing sales and production models for the thresher in Kigoma. 

WFP-X is the World Food Programme’s first-ever exploration of moonshot innovation for urban food security in frontier megacities of the future - starting with Dar es Salaam. 

Dar es Salaam is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, with a 60% increase in population expected by 2030. This rapid growth presents challenges in food security and access to a balanced and nutritious diet. Meeting that demand over the next decades, while strengthening the dimensions of availability, access, utilization, stability, agency and sustainability, will require solutions beyond current capabilities or incremental improvements.  

Working with 9 local innovators from the Tanzanian innovation and food ecosystem, WFP-X is designed to meet this need by generating audacious moonshot solutions to reshape the future of urban food systems; ideas grounded in data, science, and credible technological advancements. 

Sante Money is a mobile money wallet, on a mission to bank and monetize saving groups in Africa. Their solution aims to empower smallholder farmers by providing a digital platform (Sante Money App) that serves as their saving and lending group account, and provides group members access to other financial services like insurance and pension, bank loans and more. Sante Money was selected as a finalist from the zero AIDS, #zerohunger innovation challenge and received funding from the Hub to support their search towards a strong product-market fit. 

NINAYO is a Tanzania-based online trading platform for agriculture in East Africa. The start-up launched its operations in Tanzania in 2015 and in late 2019 joined the WFP Innovation Accelerator Sprint Programme, mainly to evaluate two new synergistic products.

They work with farmers in rural Tanzania to co-design solutions for them. Over 500 farmers are engaged with NINAYO’s WhatsApp groups, coordinated through group leaders with smartphones. 

Global WFP has implemented a 15-month pilot to test five offline, automated software applications to identify which has the most potential to teach children basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills. WFP managed all ICT, logistics, hardware and monitoring components of the projects infrastructure, by installing over 170 solar charging stations in remote villages, managed over 3,000 google tablets used by 2700 children and conducted over 10 rounds of software updates.