Marbi Agrics
Empowering Farmers with Tools & Financing
Marbi Agrics is a social agri-tech startup offering quality farm inputs such as hybrid seeds e.g. maize, beans and groundnuts and fertilizer on credit to smallholder farmers in western part of Kenya. Marbi was started to address smallholder farmers’ low access to credit and quality farm inputs, which resulted in low/no levels of income and therefore, poor quality of life.
Marbi also provides training from top agronomists, who are able to distill their knowledge into simple, easy to understand lessons that strengthen the farmers’ efforts. They aim to improving food security and sustainable livelihoods farmers.
Head office: Mumias, Kenya
We make it easy for farmers to access the credit and farm inputs they need to double their yield and dramatically increase their profitability.
Key Facts
Partnering Farmers
Jobs Created
Locations, Distribution of Farming Inputs in Western Kenya
Impact
Economics
- Sustainable income for farming communities through value addition at farm level
- Benefiting of direct link to local and international markets
Social
- Fighting hunger by securing food supply
- Women and youth empowerment
- Encourage farmer organisation to access training to ensure crop longevity and capacity building for better yields
Why Marbi Agrics?
To adequately support smallholder farmers, they need three things:
- Quality farm inputs
- Access to good agronomic services and training in the absence of public extension services offered by the government
- Post-harvest knowledge and technologies, allowing them to store their produce for longer
Marbi supplies quality bundled products and services to farmer groups in Western Kenya, alongside affordable repayment options tailored towards smallholder farmers cash flow ability.
The mission of Marbi Agrics is eradicating hunger and poverty by providing a complete & functioning market system.
Their bundled products include a package of maize seeds, ground nuts seeds, beans seeds, fertilizers (organic and inorganic), organic kitchen garden seeds, tree seedlings and 4 weeks brooded chicken and weekly extension training to the farmers.
They empower local groups that are mostly made of women. This is helping them to economically work together and interact with markets as a group.
Furthermore, the provided farm education helps the farmers increase their harvests. Therefore, Marbi Agrics takes the latest practices from top academic agronomists, and translate that into simple, easy-to-understand lessons.
Our input-output model aspires to increase household food security and farmer family income, the two factors that have potent for alleviating smallholder farmer extreme poverty situation.
The products on offer comprise of food and income value chains so as to address both food security and enhanced income concurrently. The ambition is to create a living wage of USD 5 income per family per day so as to transit the smallholder family from extreme poverty.
The social background
Smallholder agriculture is the main mode of agricultural production in Kenya, accounting for 70% of marketed agricultural production. Around 10 to 20% of smallholder farmers in Kenya are part of formal value chains, while the rest operate informally. Despite the strong presence of mobile money in rural areas, 68% of the farmers remain financially excluded. They are often at the bottom of the economic pyramid, yet they are the ones most likely to need access to financial services to finance their core economic activities and earn a living. Access to credit for farmers is often limited due to the perceived high risk of lending to the agricultural sector and farmers’ lack of financial history and this includes limited access to farmer input/asset credits to the smallholder farmers. The median monthly income for SHFs in Kenya is USD 155 per month. This results in deficit productivity, leading to household food security and low family income, worsening the extreme poverty situation.
Meet the Founder
Bernadette Mwanza
Founder & CEO of Marbi Agrics
Bernadette is the Founder and CEO of Marbi Agrics Ltd. She is a Bachelor of Commerce Finance graduate with over 15 years working experience as General Manager in sugar industry. She has worked as Team leader of Sugar belt spares Project. Therefore she is experienced in project management, advisory and monitory and with the implementation of business plans and business expansion. Bernadette is passionate about rural community empowerment. She wants to supply farmers with the tools and financing they need to grow their way out of poverty and hunger improving their livelihoods.
Our other ventures
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Ghana
Biodigester toilets for underprivileged communities
Gjenge Makers
Kenya
Building materials from plastic waste
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