Jemima Mburu

A Kenyan agricultural innovator who developed tech solutions to empower smallholder farmers

Jemima Mburu is a visionary entrepreneur from Kenya whose work in agricultural technology has revolutionized farming practices across East Africa. In 2014, she founded AgriApp, a mobile platform that connects over 200,000 smallholder farmers to real-time market prices, weather forecasts, and crop management techniques. This innovation directly addressed the information asymmetry that previously left farmers at the mercy of middlemen.

Her work gained international recognition after the UN Food and Agriculture Organization featured AgriApp as a model tech solution at the 2016 World Food Summit. Mburu's approach combines satellite data analysis with local knowledge systems, creating a unique hybrid model that has increased average incomes for participating farmers by 40%. She has also pioneered women's cooperatives within the platform, ensuring 60% of users are female-headed households.

Building on this success, she launched the AfricaGrows initiative in 2018 to train young people in agritech entrepreneurship. Over 3,000 youth have graduated from her programs, many starting their own agribusiness ventures. Mburu's TED Talk "How mobile tech feeds Africa" (2019) has been viewed over 2 million times.