Session 101 summary
Blessing shares his story in a way that would be useful for the young people and designers, and to really get them inspired to do something grateful for India, Africa and other countries. One of the things that really inspired Blessing to go into this work was his background. His grandparents were farmers, his parents right now do farming – they do poultry farming, fish farming, cassava farming etc. So, partly getting to see them farm and walk in the field of agriculture really inspired Blessing. The other part that inspired him is the community in which he grew up – he grew up in a suburban community called Sapele, based in delta state Nigeria. In that community, they lived in an area where the rich people were on the other side of the town and so they lived in a place looking at the people who are generally aspiring to do better in their lives financially. One of the things which sometimes comes to Blessing’s mind is having to see a lot of people struggle with food usually within poor communities. Over the last couple of years (this has been consistent for about 12-16 years in Nigeria) they somewhat realised that the quality level keeps climbing up and more people go into poverty. As people become poor, the place that they face the greatest impact is food, because they have less money to care of themselves, feed themselves, less money to take care of their children and their families and this is a very concerning issue. So, he really wants to encourage people: “when you think about an era where we could really make a tremendous impact, like; food being one of them, as it would have a great impact in the longer run”. Blessing says this with all sense of humility.
Malnutrition is a big issue, primarily coming from the fact that people cannot afford food – the food is too expensive for them and so they eat less frequently, resulting in malnutrition. There are different types of malnutrition but the one which Blessing shares is the ‘protein-energy malnutrition’ which is caused by a deficiency of protein in the diet that people consume and this problem affects not just children but also pregnant women. Sometimes the pregnant women have cases of eclampsia during childbirth and most of that could really lead to issue of deaths during childbirth. So, it is a very serious issue which leads to public health. The second part is regarding the kids, most of the kids have the ‘protein-energy malnutrition’ which affects the development of their brain and body which is a very big issue and problem in Nigeria, India and parts of the developing world. So, when Blessing started his work as a social entrepreneur he looked at the ‘protein-energy malnutrition’ problem at an angle and how to make the protein more affordable. There are different sources of protein: protein from crops and then protein from animals. He looked more on proteins from animals since in the community where Blessing grew up they had chicken only on special occasions. So, he was thinking about how he can make protein from livestock more affordable. He did a lot of study, as he has a background in chemistry and he also took some courses in veterinary medicine, he thought more about it from the perspective of what the people are saying and through these he found out that about 70% – 80% of the cost of raising livestock goes to feeding the livestock alone and so his hypothesis was that how to really make livestock feed more affordable because if people make it more affordable which means that they could get farmers grow that product at better margin and people can get more farms to grow protein at a better margin that will lead to more competition and would bring down the price of protein food.
He started with exploring alternative raw materials that could be used to feed livestock, like; mango seeds, seaweeds etc. Then he actually looked into few other raw materials that can be used. He worked hard on this for a couple of years; set up a factory location, began producing livestock feeds in the outer states and just selling it to people. During the course of this he began to learn a lot of lessons around solving this problem. Having done this for several years, he soon discovered that there is a big difference between a low cost solution and a solution that is affordable and that in the developing countries, even though low cost has a big appeal but in reality when the people are poor even low cost would be expensive. Blessing started realising 4-5 years ago that the issue wasn’t really about making the locals because even after reducing the price from $10 to $1-$2 it was still an amount which people could hardly afford because even at $1 some people still cannot buy a solution. Blessing places a strong emphasis on this because as designers need to think from the perspective of the customer, the customer is the person who is paying. So, just because something is low cost, it doesn’t mean that it is going to scale – this was the biggest lesson he learnt in his career as a social entrepreneur and so there is a need to create more affordable solutions and affordability has to do with “how do we design a solution in a way that people can pay for it with their current resources”.
Thinking about affordability, Blessing pondered on questions like ‘how do we make things more affordable’ which led him through several parts. The first thing which he did was, about 5 years ago, he began to think about – the livestock farmers, what kind of problems he can solve for them to really make their businesses more profitable and beyond the animal feed, the second thing he thought about was health, because that was a place where farmers were really losing money. So, he began to design a solution around detailing animal health data so that if there is a case of disease outbreak that information can go around fast and the government can create an intervention to tackle it for farms. They gained quick success with that. Lately they started working on Google Finance Thoughts and the federal government together with the World Bank had these projects called the National Animal Disease Information System, who engaged with Blessings team and worked with them to absorb that particular innovation and solution at a national level. Which is a dream of every social entrepreneur i.e. to have something they developed get adopted in a very good and big agencies that will help them gain in a massive scale.
Even with that happening, around the animal health side of thing, he still wasn’t really seeing the kind of change which he had envisioned. In fact the price of animal protein was increasing by the year. So, part of what he tried to do was: “how do we democratise knowledge – the knowledge of the raw materials’. So, instead of keeping the information in propriety, they decided to make it open. One of the things which he is working on with USAID was around developing insect-based feeds. USAID engaged with him and Blessing brought them to his facility in the outer state and showed them how breeding in the micro livestock – the insects worked. The representatives were mind blown with how the things worked there and that led to a whole new journey with USAID, who sent Blessing to Belgium and Lead Alliance alongside a number of professors to explore the companies etc. So, right now in Nigeria this type of farming is now popular. But what Blessing has discovered is that even with coming up with alternative raw materials to use, the problem still remains because the insect based feed is still going to become expensive with high demand/ high pressure on that nutrient source. It was roughly about 2 years ago that the idea really struck him to really focus on affordability and for Blessing affordability now is: “if someone spends 50 cents per day, how do we design a solution through which they can pay 5 cents per day/month for a particular solution using what they currently have”. That is what led him to the whole concept of what he is doing right now, which is really focused around how to drive assets to capital. For e.g. in Africa alone the demand for capital in agriculture is over 180 billion dollar, it is a massive market, and Nigeria alone accounts for 90% of the market. So, there is seen a huge financing gap and because there is not enough investment into agriculture the cost of inputs are so high resulting in the cost of outputs from the farms being high – whether crop farming, livestock farming etc. So, that keeps the constraints within the system keeps frustrating these innovations that were trying to design to solve the issue of malnutrition. So, one of the thigs which they began right now was to really design financial solutions – that can help small scale farms get the type of financial resources they need to grow food at a right price which makes more sense for them economically, have a generic profit and also drives higher competition in terms of production of products.
Since they are looking at malnutrition not just as a nutritional challenge but also as a financial challenge and that is affecting how they are currently designing solution. Currently Blessing’s big vision is: To really build like a backdrop for agriculture within developing countries. How do we drive more capital to the farms that need them, so that they can produce food better, they can produce food at a more affordable rate etc.
About the Speaker
Kartik Butola
Blessing Mene’s purpose is to help people prosper financially. He is a social innovator, creative entrepreneur and a resilient leader. Blessing has a background in agriculture, social entrepreneurship, and economic development. Blessing is the author of “The Winning Streak”, a life-changing book for young social innovators looking to develop clarity, raise capital and sustainably grow their enterprises. Blessing is an Ashoka Fellow, Global Good Fund Fellow and 2020 Goalkeepers Rebuilder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Blessing serves as the CEO of Vetsark, a social enterprise with a vision to transform agriculture in Africa. Vetsark won the Google Impact Challenge Public Choice Prize for its impact in safeguarding animal health for farmers and the general public. Blessing has built a parallel system that takes care of the poultry value chain from the production of alternative feeds to the final consumers ensuring that farmers who take up the alternative feeds for their poultry are guaranteed sales of their products. He is providing alternative feeds for farmers, positioning them to produce livestock at a much cheaper rate, and provide more protein for the African populace. Blessing is creating a market for alternative livestock feed made from readily available waste materials. He is turning neglected abundant seeds that ordinarily were considered waste materials into useful products for poultry and other animals.
