Tevis Howard | Komaza
Fellows work to maximize the impact of their ideas through design. They work through a systematic process driven by the five elements of scalability: real impact, big bang for the buck, lasting behavior change, easy replication, and the right path to scale. Fellows participate in the program for two years, working through several design iterations.
THE IDEA: Komaza
Change small plots of dry land into profitable family farms: provide farmers with training, inputs, credit and markets to grow trees and crops on their fallow land
HOW IT WORKS
- Mobilize farmers in a rural village
- Provide bulk-purchased farm inputs and tools on credit
- Supply training for land preparation, planting and risk-reducing maintenance
- Process farm produce into high-value products
- Sell farm products to local, regional, and international buyers
- Take repayment for all costs and a profit from each farm
- Take repayment for all costs and a profit from each farm
THE PERSON: Tevis Howard
Tevis Howard is a visionary young scientist from the Silicon Valley turned agricultural social business entrepreneur
While studying neuroscience at university, Tevis made several trips to Kenya to do malaria research. Seeing extreme rural poverty at length for the first time made him realize that there was something even more fun to tackle than malaria and he switched from science to social entrepreneurship. Now he lives in Kenya, where KOMAZA’s team of overachievers develops profitable solutions to serve the hardest-to-reach families living in chronic poverty.
THE STORY
75% of the world’s poor are farmers, with the hardest to serve living in infertile, dry environments where traditional farming fails more often than it succeeds. Most of the land lies fallow and many families eke out income by cutting down what’s left of indigenous trees to sell as charcoal. Tevis Howard started KOMAZA to develop new agricultural businesses that turn families’ unproductive land into cash-crop farms. KOMAZA provides poor farmers with training, inputs, credit and markets to grow trees and other profitable crops on dry fallow land, and the sequence of crop harvests makes them money continuously with a lump sum when trees are cut down. Families contribute land and labor, KOMAZA markets their crops for them while taking a cut to recover the cost of inputs and services. KOMAZA has the potential to a profitable path out of poverty for millions of hard-to-reach farmers who live over 2 billion acres of fallow yet farmable land in Africa.
CONTACT
Website: www.komaza.org
Email: Tevis@komaza.org
USA Voicemail: +1-650-941-0701
Kenyan Mobile: +254-724-725-949