Member Article

Interview: Kenny Ewan explains how WeFarm is building ‘the internet for people with no internet’

Launched in 2014 after spinning out from NGO Cafedirect Producers’ Foundation, WeFarm is spreading a quiet peer-to-peer revolution throughout the rural heartlands of Kenya, Uganda and Peru with its SMS-based advice service for smallholder farmers.

Now, in the midst of its Series A funding round and an appearance as the UK representative in Chivas Regal’s The Venture competition, the firm has its sights set on global expansion, bringing its pioneering service to more of the 500m smallholder farmers across the world.

Steered by Kenny Ewan, WeFarm’s Chief Executive Officer and founder, the scope and reach of the social business has expanded massively since its humble beginnings as a means for information sharing between NGOs and individual farmers.

“We’re looking to change perception a little, the idea that poor people need to be told what to do,” Kenny told me, underlining the ethos of empowerment that is a riposte to the often patronising shade of Western aid and support to the developing world.

Drawing on open, community-driven online resources like Wikipedia, but driven by a simple text messaging service, Kenny has visions of a truly open, crowdsourced information bank that links smallholder farmers from across the globe. But how does the system work?

“Essentially it works mostly off a question and answer form. Farmers join our platform via SMS, and can text a question beginning with Q#,” Kenny explains.

“When the system receives a question with Q# we then send that out to 30 to 50 other who may be able to help based on keywords, climate and other factors.”

The system’s algorithm, which is getting smarter all the time, cherrypicks those who it thinks may be well placed to help out, and then looks to return three to four answers to the original farmer.

It is an elegant and simple way for farmers, who are often isolated from community networks and other farms, to access pooled knowledge from others who have had similar problems and are in similar circumstances.

As Kenny outlines, poor physical and communications infrastructure means that approaches and techniques which come naturally to one farm are totally alien to another just a few miles down the road.

As Kenny puts it: “We’re seeing farmers coming up with ideas and creative solutions in their local area. One has a problem and then someone has the same problem 20 miles down the road.”

With worldwide mobile ownership exploding in recent years, we have seen an increasing number of tech companies taking advantage of the now relatively low-tech solution of SMS-based services.

From remittance payments back home with the likes of London’s WorldRemit to entirely SMS money transfers, WeFarm is fitting in to the proliferation of technological solutions that rely solely on the humble text message.

And while Kenny believes the impact of this can be overstated as it is often focused on urban areas, he still believes the likes of WeFarm can bring about the vision of ‘the internet for people without the internet’ that remains central to the organisation’s vision. In particular, that key concept touched upon earlier, of having a bottom up resource created by those who are going to use it, rather than one dictated by those in the West.

“Increasingly people are coming around to the idea that tech can be liberating and empowering. Rather than reinforcing existing power structures.”

Underlying it all is a commitment to the democratising force of technology. I ask him what role tech can have in redressing the balance between the developed and developing world:

“Overall I do see that being democratising. Giving people more voice and power, in particular with the proliferation of SMS-based projects. People have been looking at it from the wrong way round: it should be how do we use SMS and this technology breakthrough to have a new conversation?

“Increasingly people are coming around that to idea that tech can be liberating and empowering. Rather than reinforcing existing power structures.”

The hope is that WeFarm will become the go-to resource for the world’s legion of smallholder farmers, written by smallholder farmers for smallholder farmers. However, as any website that encourages user submissions will tell you, encouraging user contributions brings with it its own set of problems.

Much like the comment section on a newspaper’s website or any number of dark corners on Twitter, WeFarm has had its fair share of unsuitable or inappropriate content.

Through its team of moderators and translators, who Kenny is keen to stress do not meddle directly with the information and resources provided by the service’s users, WeFarm looks to scrub out abuse and other unsavoury content which services such as these are so prone to.

“One of the things you have to get used to, is that you naturally get people who are starting to abuse it. Our job is about promoting the right types of information, get that right and you start to see real value from it,” he explains.

Ensuring the quality of the information is key to the London-based organisation’s growth, as it is to any number of other websites which rely on crowdsourced information, particularly as the data it generates is key to making the business profitable.

And while making this jump from a charitable organisation to a truly profitable social business is, in Kenny’s words, ‘a big jump to make, with an evolution of changes’, the firm has already managed to turnover £400k this year to add to its 70,000 users and 7m interactions.

The aggregated information from the service could prove priceless to NGOs and other organisations in analysing and tracking the development of the developing world’s smallholder farmers, who remain largely undocumented as things stand.

As such, despite significant early scepticism from donors, others NGOs and partners about the viability of WeFarm’s P2P approach, people are slowly coming around to Kenny and co’s pioneering approach, as the organisation primes itself for further expansion into new markets.

Thinking long term, Kenny hopes that bedding in early with farmers who have perhaps been previously left behind in the technological revolution will put WeFarm in good stead once those same people begin to trade up to more technologically advanced devices.

With an eye on smartphone growth into Africa, making WeFarm a trusted and reliable platform, the equivalent to an Facebook or Wikipedia for farmers, is key to both the business’ ethos and growth:

“Smartphone usage is starting to penetrate more into African rural markets. We’re ready for that, graduating people. When they get their smartphone they’ll want to use somewhere they trust.”

You can find out more about WeFarm’s mission and methods at www.wefarm.org and you can help the firm win a share of $250,000 of investment at by voting for it on The Venture website.