PIC CAPTIONS: Soinato Leboo, co-founder at Rhea, an innovative women-led soil health management startup in Kenya won the Best AfricArena Climate Tech Startup Award at the AfricArena Nairobi Summit in September. As an AfricArena Tour finalist, Rhea will pitch their solution to startups at the tour's grand finale, the AfricArena Grand Summit in Cape Town, South Africa in December. Image: Supplied / AfricArena
Huge investments are streaming into Africa’s booming climate tech industry. Rhea, a dynamic women-led Kenyan agritech startup that focuses on utilizing digital solutions to revolutionize soil testing management process is a shining star within Africa’s climate tech landscape. AfricArena’s Jabulile Sonya Ngwenya chats with one of Rhea’s co-founders, Soinato Leboo, to find out what makes this award-winning agritech startup successful within an increasingly competitive landscape.
Thrilled about her startup’s impact within Africa’s agritech landscape, Leboo tells AfricArena that “Rhea offers a groundbreaking solution for onsite soil testing and real-time delivery of results and recommendations. By building an onsite IoT-powered sensor device, we analyze basic soil nutrients and generate recommendations using machine learning software. This cutting-edge technology aims to enhance agricultural productivity and sustainability by providing accurate and timely soil health information to farmers.”
Rhea is part of the SAIS powered by GIZ 2024 cohort. SAIS stands for “Scaling digital Agriculture Innovations through Start-ups” and is a project implemented by the German Agency for International Cooperation/Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ GmbH) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It is co-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Bayer Cares Foundation.
What Rhea has to offer within the market has changed the way smallholder farmers in Kenya go about growing and expanding their agricultural enterprises.
Rhea won the Best Climate Tech Startup Award at the AfricArena Nairobi 2024 Summit held in Nairobi, Kenya in September. Winning this award, Leboo says, “This opportunity has allowed me to refine how to communicate the company and its value better through pitching and has provided visibility to potential investors and partners in the space.” She tells AfricArena that this win has helped them to improve their visibility within Africa’s agritech sector and their most recent business success is entering into a partnership with the Eastern Africa Grain Council. “We are their (EAGC) soil health partners, thus providing soil analysis solutions and soil health trainings for their farmers to increase their productivity . This is an incredible achievement because it gives Rhea access to over three million farmers spanning across eight countries in Eastern Africa.”
Leboo, who helped her parents run and manage their farm during her universities’ school breaks tells AfricArena that due to this experience, she developed a keen interest in agriculture and food systems, and went to study International Relations with a specialisation in development studies and entrepreneurship at United States International University - Africa. “It was during my studies I discovered that agriculture is a major contributor to the economic growth of African economies. I was very intrigued with why agriculture was generating immense prosperity for developed countries, but in Africa, agriculture was not contributing effectively to the prosperity and growth of a lot of countries.”
These insights led her to conduct research on agribusinesses across nine counties in Kenya during 2021. “While I conducted my thesis research, I interacted closely with farmers and found that they faced a lot of challenges in their agricultural activities and the problem of how to increase quality and quantity production became the most glaring problem” Leboo tells AfricArena.
While in the midst of her thesis, Leboo shares that she met Priscilla Wakarera, an experienced soil scientist who introduced her to the importance of soil testing and helped her to make the link between soil health and the quality and quantity of crop production problem. She recalls that during their conversations, she had a lightbulb moment and Rhea was born when she and Priscilla decided to join forces “to find a solution to a major challenge African smallholder farmers are facing, where soil analysis is timely, convenient and accessible, that will allow them to make effective decisions on their planting activities.”
The road to success was not easy, Leboo admits, especially as women founders spearheading and leading a women owned and women led startup with hardware and software soil health solutions. “Between us, we had $3,000 to start Rhea and today, we are currently looking to raise $350,000 in funds this year,” she says. “The funds we raise will be used for manufacturing of soil testing devices, expansion plans into Uganda and Tanzania in 2025, and customer acquisition costs. We hope to raise grant funding for research and development of our innovation and partner with research institutions, cooperatives, and manufacturers to make our solution more effective and impactful to our target customers.”
Soinato Leboo, shares that one of the best pieces of advice a mentor gave her was to “Listen to your gut and intuition, it is usually right, and will guide you to where you need to be.” When startups found themselves in uncharted waters with the funding winter hit, this wise advice helped Leboo to lead her startup with courage. Navigating the funding winter, she says, was not a cake walk as they had to tweak a few strategies to get through the funding winter. “Some strategies that Rhea has used to flourish during the funding winter included looking for strategic partnerships to lower costs,” Leboo tells AfricArena. “These partnerships assisted us in acquiring and retaining customers at a lower conversion rate cost, thus allowing us to extend our run way and find you avenues for customer acquisition.
Both women are passionate about what they do because they enjoy solving a challenge and are passionate about Africa’s agricultural sector. “I like a challenge and being an entrepreneur is fitting for that,” says Leboo. “I am especially passionate about solving problems in the agriculture and climate space because it affects a lot of our lives. Agriculture impacts not only the ability to feed a nation, but also the economic strength and development of its people. I am passionate about figuring out how to make farming more profitable and sustainable for small scale farmers, and how it can help raise the economic development of communities all across Africa.”
Leboo tells AfricArena it was only when she and her co-founder did their first soil health training workshop in Kenya that they saw there was a need for their solution in the market. “At this training, farmers discovered the importance of soil testing and health, and this allowed us to get our first paying customers and start the journey on providing value to smallholder farmers through soil health management solutions.”
On any given day, Leboo can be found wearing many hats as she leads her team in building and expanding Rhea. “As an entrepreneur in an early stage start-up, I wear many hats. One day I am busy with meetings in the office, while on other days I am in the field meeting customers. At the end of any day, I usually like getting some form of exercise in and unwinding through cooking or spending time with family and friends.”
Candid about how being an entrepreneur isn’t easy, Leboo shares that one of the biggest challenges she and her team faced was “getting access to partners, policy makers and expertise in building innovations that can allow us to build quickly, iterate and deploy to the market.” Taking the African continent’s current tech landscape into account, she says, “Building hardware, especially with innovative technology, can be difficult, especially in Africa where we are still building capacity and infrastructure for manufacturing and IP. We are excited and hopeful that as the continent continues rapidly growing, policies and stakeholders will also be able to mitigate this challenge.”
Enthusiastic about what the future holds for her and Africa’s agritech sector, Leboo believes the future is bright, and has plans for scaling her startup throughout the African continent. “ I plan to continue growing Rhea and strive to make it a company that creates value for smallholder farmers in Africa, contributing to food security, economic development, and environmental conservation.” She continues, sharing advice with founders who want to follow in her footsteps and become agri techpreneurs, “As a start-up in the climate and agri-tech sector, I would advise founders to create solutions to problems that are most needed by the people who are being most impacted by the problem. If you are able to solve big problems for a lot of people and get paid for it, you are on to something great.”
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