ICow, the winning application in the Apps for Africa Competition in 2010 introduced a new feature the iCow Soko, allowing small- scale dairy farmers to trade livestock on their mobile phones in Kenya.
ICow initially started as portal for small scale dairy farmers to manage their livestock by monitoring elements such as their nutrition, estrus cycles, milk production and health through inbuilt applications on the platform. Including web and mobile accessible customizable calculators and calendars.With the launch of iCow Soko, smallholder farmers on the platform are now able to maximize their returns by getting better deals for their livestock and by-products when trading with producers directly. Soko is the Swahili word for market.The service has scaled beyond the trading of livestock (including chicken, goats and sheep) to trees and agricultural by- products. The trade requires farmers to send their listings in predefined input formats to an SMS line, supported on all Kenyan handsets and mobile operator networks. The actual trade transaction takes place with the use of mobile money.ICow Soko launches in a market that has seen success by a number of competing agri innovations such as the M-Farm, a real-time group buying and selling market for farmers, that also launched in 2010 after receiving capital investment of €10,000 at the IPO48 investment bootcamp event. iCow however competes by focusing its enterprises on livestock and dairy farming in Kenya.Su Kuhumbu of the Green Dreams TECH Ltd and founder of iCow, stated that the company was working hard on their product, though without revealing the number of farmers using the platform.“We have farmers and cows in over 37 counties using the iCow platform and are spot on course of our strategic plan. We have spent the last 7 months building on product development and user experience, and are as yet to launch into our marketing phase although farmers and other Agri stakeholders continue to register and use the various features of iCow on a daily basis”, Su Kuhumbu told HumanIPO.In a country that has seen brilliant innovations such as the M-Pesa mobile money transfer service, iCow is only among a handful of sustainable ideas that are spreading the growing entrepreneurial culture in the East African region.
