Maryanne Gichanga refers to her company, AgriTech Analytics as the “farmer’s friend”. Considering the smile that radiates across her face and the go-getter attitude that motivates everyone around her, we think it’s an apt description for this year’s Global Citizen Waislitz Award-winner and the company she co-founded.
Feeding the World, Yet Left Behind
We’d like to take it one step further. It’s not just that AgriTech Analytics is the “farmer’s friend” — it is, in fact, the farmer’s champion, and hearing Gichanga, the company’s CEO, discuss the importance of smallholder farmers proves just that.
“It is important for us to recognize the hard work that the smallholder farmers put in. If the smallholder farmers were to retire or quit, then there would be no food. They've been ignored, yet they're the majority,” she said. “I mean these farmers contribute to over 80% of the food consumed, but they're the poorest. Nobody really seems to think about them. Even when people sit at big tables, or when there are COP meetings, there's no representative who's a smallholder farmer there.”
This is the foundation on which the company was built. Gichanga’s work on AgriTech Analytics is dedicated to smallholder farmers and their commitment to feeding our societies. The Kenyan start-up is designed to benefit every person who cultivates, eats, and feeds within a community. The aim is to alleviate hunger by empowering rural farms and ensuring that the food produced is wholesome and nutritious — all while helping farmers and their families achieve more stable livelihoods.
This is largely done by equipping small-scale agriculturalists with the knowledge and tools they need to enhance their work and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
“We help them walk the journey with everything that they need to know about farming,” explained Gichanga. “We are there telling them it's time to water, or if there’s too much water. We tell them to reduce the fertiliser, or if they do not need fertiliser. We say: ‘I think it's time to uproot the weed or it's time to plant this instead.’”
Harnessing Tech for the Fields
And how do they acquire the knowledge to provide such solutions? Through innovative technological interventions. Gichanga went on: “We’ve been able to incorporate IoT and satellites so we can have historic data and present-day data, and we are able to predict three weeks of what is going to happen in terms of the weather. We are also able to understand what was happening on a farm before and to see and study the soil degradation and how it's going.”
What’s more, the company uses its own AI solutions to further understand the issues that farmers are facing, adapting the AI to comprehend region-specific issues that their crops might have.
Global Citizen Waislitz Award Winner, Maryanne Gichanga on the job and in the field with AgriTech Analytics. Her company works to identify solutions to the issues that smallholder farmers and their experience. They do this through AI-driven solution-mapping and human-centred training.
“We have a team that does AI training. We train our own AI models because we want it to be as practical as possible for the smallholder farmers that we are working with,” she told Global Citizen. “There's a lot of free data out there, but if you just plug in from the [existing] free data, it most probably is not from our region and it means that the solutions the device is going to recommend are not going to be actionable for the smallholder farmers. So we do our own AI training.”
I mean these farmers contribute to over 80% of the food consumed, but they're the poorest.
From Farmer’s Daughter to AgriTech Innovator
Gichanga knows the tribulations that small-scale farmers experience all too well, as both her parents are smallholder agriculturalists. She grew up with an understanding of financial instability as a result of their profession, but also a sense of frustration in knowing that the work her parents and other farmers do is critical to our food systems, yet is highly unpredictable.
“I am a farmer's daughter. Growing up, I witnessed good yields and seasons where the farms were doing well. And I was also there when the farm's yields were reducing,” Gichanga told Global Citizen. “There were a lot of issues. There were a lot of pests and diseases that were new and nobody knew how to manage them. In fact, there was a time when my father took out a loan to pay for my education and he was auctioned because the yields failed that season.”
She continued: “So for me it's personal. The persistence with which I saw my parents take me through school is what pushes me [to continue my work] because I know there are so many kids who are in the same situation. Their parents are farmers. They are not sure whether there's going to be money for school fees next year so their education is on the line. They are not sure whether they can get access to good health care because their parents are relying on unpredictable weather. You know, they do not understand the changes that are happening in farming but farming is their source of livelihood.”
When she forayed into agriculture, in the footsteps of her parents, initially they didn’t quite understand her career choice. However, they quickly turned their opinions around and have become Gichanga’s biggest cheerleaders.
AgriTech Analytics CEO and co-founder, Maryanne Gichanga speaks to a smallholder farmer in Kenya. Gichanga is also the 2025 winner of the Global Citizen Waislitz Disruptor Award.
A Team To End Hunger
AgriTech Analytics has a dedicated team behind it, including 15 permanent employees and a vast number of contractors all working to fulfil the needs that farmers have. Gichanga lists researchers, engineers, agronomists, marketers, salespeople, customer relations, and community leaders among the bricks that build the AgriTech Analytics team — a team that not only provides farmers with solutions, but assists them every step of the way in implementing these solutions in their day-to-day work. To this team she has one message:
“I want to encourage them to keep doing whatever it is that they're doing, it is actually making an impact and they're not wasting their time — they're building onto solving poverty in the world.”
She added: “The problems they're solving are not only affecting people in Africa, but globally. We could even scale globally and that for us is an encouragement. I know that they work so hard and I am so proud of them, we can do this. I mean, the sky is the limit. So we keep improving, we keep growing, and we keep reaching as many farmers as we can because that is our mission.”
Smallholder farmers feed the world and are the key to ending hunger, yet they remain some of the most vulnerable members of society. Through AgriTech Analytics, their work is strengthened and given the resources needed for farms and communities to thrive; a feat fully deserving of the Global Citizen Waislitz Disruptor Award.