Stage of Innovation: Idea (You have thought it through and documented it)

Problem: One of the biggest reasons causing high poverty and low productivity among small scale farmers is manual threshing of harvested grains which cumbersome, laborious and time consuming. Farmers can spend over 6 hours to manually thresh 50kg of maize and rice from its cob. Current solution are fuel powered grain threshers but these machines are quite expensive to purchase and operate as owners need to constantly buy fuel or diesel and they emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Furthermore, most people especially those in rural communities of Nigeria fall trees as a source of charcoal for cooking, this is negatively affecting our environment and causing deforestation and negative climate change

Unique Selling Point: Current solution are manual threshing or fuel powered grain thresher. We manufacture and provide farmers with on-demand grain threshing services using a solar powered machine thresher to help improve their productivity and income. Our solar thresher is mobile, uses no fuel, its noiseless and a better alternative to fuel powered grain threshing machine. Through phone call or text messaging, farmers can request for our threshing services. We group farmers and bring our mobile threshing machine to their location which threshes grains 20 times faster than manual methods at a more affordable rate. After threshing, we pick up the waste product which are maize cob and rice stalk and we recycle them into charcoal briquettes that are smokeless, hotter and emits zero carbon which are better substitute to charcoal from tree. Our target market are small-scale farmers growing grains especially rice and maize that needs threshing. We make money from offering our solar threshing service on a pay-per-use basis and selling of our charcoal briquettes. Our service is generating positive impacts by improve the productivity and income of small-scale farmers as they will be able to thresh more grains faster and more efficiently, they will also be able to save money because our grain threshing services is more affordable because of low operating cost from the use of solar energy as against fuel. Using solar powered thresher will also curtail green house gas emission responsible for climate change and make our world better. Our briquettes will reduce the cutting down of tree thus minimizing deforestation and create green jobs for the youths and the women in our communities.