My entrepreneurial journey with Sayetech began when I volunteered in a rural community without electricity as a missionary for an interdenominational church. Even though I had trained as an engineer, after my undergraduate studies in Ghana, I decided to give back to the community as a teacher and to do this I decided to volunteer as a missionary.
While doing that, I was teaching a lot of children, most of whom had nowhere to sit and others had no shoes. I remember a time when I went to class during harvest time and there were only two children in class. One had come to call the other out of the classroom to go to the farms to work. That really disheartened me because I was trying to bring some transformation to the children in the community through teaching.
This really hit me hard because I knew that we could make machines locally to help in farms and keep the children in school. While in university, I had worked on over five projects, where I collaborated with like-minded teams and local artisans to build prototypes. All of them were non-academic.
“For me, starting Sayetech was about keeping the children in school. So that very day, I took a motorbike to a community with electricity, charged my phone and called a university friend, now my co-founder. I asked what he thought about building machines locally after explaining the situation on the ground. He agreed to do it and Sayetech was born,” Jeffrey Appiagyei, reminisces his motivation behind starting Sayetech.
Initially we also wanted to design the machines and equipment and give them to local artisans to manufacture them for us but this idea did not work. We were also fortunate to have met some of the organizers of the previous competitions that I had been part of. They were interested in becoming our first customer and to provide design services and that was also with USAID so we decided to start a company that would design machines and manufacture them, we were privileged to have USAID as our first customer for the design service.
When we started out in late 2018 we just had an idea and a customer (USAID) who paid for our registration. In 2019, we were privileged to be awarded by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for our flagship of the motorcar pressure which was also highly sponsored by USAID. They advised us to manufacture the equipment instead of just being on the design side because one of the problems we had started to encounter is that most of the artisans were not manufacturing them well to maintain the standards. That is how we came into the manufacturing space. They gave us a grant to proceed with it and we were able to start to rent out a space and build our manufacturing plant.
Today at Sayetech
Today we have equipment of more than 10 units, we also have a mobile app that allows us to track your machine’s. We are consistently building machines and we are currently working on one of the products that is going to transform the cocoa industry in Ghana in terms of mechanization. We are not just trying to keep the children in school, it cuts across. It’s not just about the children, it’s also about their parents; the farmers, it’s about helping them reduce their post harvest losses. It’s also about the economic productivity lost because of lack of equipment, and the fact that industrialization in Africa is still lagging behind.
Sayetech aims to provide smart agricultural solutions for smallholder farmers in Africa to ensure we create sustainable African youth enterprises. We are trying to industrialize Africa starting with Ghana and in the context of reducing food losses. Within the manufacturing space, we are also able to design and produce other equipment for different spaces as we grow to make sure that we have more refined products and eventually grow the continent economically through industrialization. The Sayetech team comprises 14 full time staff members; five are members of the management team.
About the Generation Africa Fellowship Program
The Generation Africa Fellowship Africa Program has been very helpful for us and this is because we are planning to expand our operations to Kenya. My mentor was crucial in helping us verify our registration document and recommend changes as well as initiate the process to make sure we document the file registrations properly within Kenya. There is also the network of people we have met in cyberspaces doing different things and that has been very encouraging to see other young people from across the continent doing great things.
On top of that, my mentor Mr. Joel Asiago, understood the Kenyan agricultural flows and dynamics and had knowledge in the agricultural supply chain; interacting with him gave us in depth knowledge of the Kenyan agricultural industry. This is withstanding the fact that myself and a couple of our team members have previously been to Kenya more than three times to conduct market research.
What we learnt from him was more extensive than what we could have collected. Ideally, being part of the Generation Africa Fellowship Programme has given us a lot of exposure and it has been very fulfilling for us to be recognized that we are doing something impactful in the continent. Also, it is clear that GAFP helped us avoid some possible mistakes that we may have made during the expansion to Kenya.
What Next for Sayetech?
We are looking to scale across the continent to be able to serve the East and West African markets with smart small equipment that will help farmers in agribusiness produce more and reduce their losses.
In the future, we will also focus on more partnerships to make equipment available for young people to encourage agribusiness entrepreneurship among the youth and women. We continue to grow, we continue to learn and we continue to unlearn some things too in the journey to becoming one of the most successful businesses in Africa.
Interviewed by Odhiambo Obonyo
