This week, I offer a verbatim text transcript of a BBC News series report about an excellent invention by a young Ugandan, which has serious potential to solve Africa’s severe food waste crisis. If you are a crop farmer, this is one video you MUST watch.

==STARTS===

[Video Text] Could Lawrence Okettayot hold the answer to Africa’s food waste crisis?

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Tayo Solagbade’s
Performance Improvement IDEAS
(PI Squared) Newsletter

Monday 15th October 2018

NB: This PI Squared newsletter will be published weekly, on Mondays, in place of the Speaking/Web Marketing IDEAS newsletter, starting from today – 15th February 2016. I’m reinventing my Monday newsletter content and theme, to accommodate my vision of serving the growing audience of serious minded individuals and organizations reaching out to me, with information, education. news and research findings designed to help them do what they do better.

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PII 138: VIDEO – Ugandan Lawrence Okettayot’s Garden Waste Powered Dryer Boosts Farmer Profits by 400% and Reduces Food Waste by 75%

This week, I offer a verbatim text transcript of a BBC News series report about an excellent invention by a young Ugandan, which has serious potential to solve Africa’s severe food waste crisis. If you are a crop farmer, this is one video you MUST watch.

==STARTS===

[Video Text] Could Lawrence Okettayot hold the answer to Africa’s food waste crisis?

He’s on a road trip across Uganda to find out.

Lawrence Okettayot: “When you talk to someone they’re like, ‘Man, how do you think you’re going to accomplish this? There are European white people out there who have done a lot of technology. And you’re just a mere African. How do you think you are going to make this thing go big?”

[Video Text] There’s a lot of food waste in Africa. Enough to fee 300 million people every year.

So this is Lawrence’s solution.

It’s called a Sparky Dryer.

Powered by garden waste, it dehydrates fruits and vegetables, extending the shelf life from two days, to two years.

Lawrence Okettayot: So, this is our very own first prototype of the Sparky Dryer.

This is our heat source here.

Then this is the drying chamber, where we dehydrate all our products from.

[Video text] Lawrence is now taking the Sparky Dryer to the world.

Starting in remote northern Uganda.

The people here are still recovering from 20 years of brutal conflict that almost destroyed their farming way of life.

Lawrence Okettayot: We have lost quite a lot of people. So basically we lost how to do a lot of faming and agriculture.

[Video text] The problems here sparked the Sparky Dryer idea

So it happened when I was discussing with my uncle, and I asked him “What is really the problem with agriculture? Because you are telling me you wanted to leave farming and do some other things like building.”

Then he was like “You know the main problem is when we harvest our product, it’s quite hard for us to store all of it, because we don’t have any other means of storing it, like preserving it.”

[VIDEO TEXT] Browsing the market in the town of Kitgum reveals that more than a third of everything grown here goes to waste.

Lawrence Okettayot: When I see rotten vegetables like these…these quite inspire me to keep on going, so that next time when I get here, I don’t see anything like this. I only see nice fruit, dried fruits and dried vegetables around.

[VIDEO TEXT] But so far Lawrence has only sold seven Sparky Dryers. And one of those was to his uncle. So far has the Sparky Dryer has helped Uncle Joe?

[Uncle Joe] Before the Sparky Dryer, we were wasting a lot of our income. And we were so really poor because of that thing. We could not even take our children at school, because there was no money.

[VIDEO TEXT] But now Uncle Joe can dry his crops in just a few hours, every day. Come rain or shine. So he no longer wastes 75^ of his harvest. In fact, he wastes nothing. And he’s made enough extra money, to pay for this new building on his farm.

[Uncle Joe] When you take these two mangoes in the market, you will get only 500 shillings. A mango like this one, when it is dried, you will get 1000 shillings out of it.

[VIDEO TEXT] So the Sparky Dryer has increased Uncle Joe’s income by 400%.Just what Lawrence wanted to hear. And on the way back to Kitgum there’s more good news. Another order for a Sparky Dryer.

So the product works and demand is growing.

But will that be enough to make the Sparky Dryer a life-changing African innovation?

[Dr. Roy William Mayega – Resilient African Network] People in Uganda tend to prefer products made elsewhere, trusting that this thing really works better, if it comes, let’s say, from outside of Africa, or from some other country that they consider credible.

So that is a real issue that we need to change.

[VIDEO TEXT] But maybe that change has just begun…with Lawrence and his Sparky Dryer innovation.

Lawrence Okettayot: We want to scale this up to reach East Africa, then South African and other parts of the world. And by doing that, I’ll be the happiest man on Earth because I would have saved quite a lot of people going hungry every day.

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This BBC series was produced with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

===ENDS===

Click here to watch the video titled “Food Waste Warrior” on the BBC News on Instangram website

https://www.instagram.com/p/BmdguHYHp_g/

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