Emmanuel Osei Mensah, PhD Scholar, speaking on behalf of the Soilless Veggy team, as he shares how JR Biotek’s Africa Bio-Innovation Pitch Challenge inspired their venture idea and helped them take their first steps towards developing a transformative agricultural solution.
Fueling African Innovation: Scaling Impact with AGRIIP
At JR Biotek Foundation, we believe that Africa’s greatest agricultural, food security, and environmental solutions must be locally adaptable, science-driven, and led by those who understand the challenges firsthand. African scientists and agripreneurs rooted in their communities are best positioned to develop practical, scalable solutions that create lasting impact.
This vision inspired the Africa Bio-Innovation Pitch Competition, launched in 2017 as a platform to foster collaboration, scientific innovation, and entrepreneurship. Over the five-year run, we challenged young African innovators to propose ideas or concepts that can be harnessed and turned into practical solutions for sustainable agriculture, food production, education and policy frameworks.
A Solution for Food Security: Soilless Veggy (Ghana)
One of the most inspiring success stories from the 2021 Africa Bio-Innovation Pitch Competition is Soilless Veggy, an innovative team of four scientists from Ghana. Their winning solution was designed to tackle a major challenge affecting millions of smallholder farmers: limited access to arable land and agricultural inputs.
Using locally available materials and minimal soil, they proposed a venture concept around developing a nutrient-rich, cost-effective growing medium that boosts vegetable productivity in small spaces. Their approach offered a potential scalable solution for resource-constrained communities, reducing dependence on fertile land and expensive fertilizers while promoting climate-smart agriculture.
With seed funding provided by the competition, Soilless Veggy successfully tested their concept on a small scale, generating promising qualitative and quantitative results. These initial findings demonstrated strong potential for broader application, revealing key avenues for scaling the innovation to reach more smallholder farmers.
Their journey is a testament to how strategic investment in African-led innovation can drive transformative solutions for food security, ensuring that groundbreaking ideas move from concept to implementation, ultimately improving agricultural sustainability and livelihoods.
Beyond Competition: Scaling African-Led Innovations with AGRIIP
While the Africa Bio-Innovation Pitch Competition has sparked many high-impact ideas, too many game-changing solutions stall at the early stages due to limited funding, technical support, and market access. To truly move the needle, we must go beyond competitions and provide innovators with the long-term support needed to scale their work. This is where the Agri-Innovation & Impact Project (AGRIIP) comes in.
AGRIIP is a bold, five-year initiative designed to empower 100 agricultural scientists and 3,000 farmers across Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, providing them with:
✅ A collaborative, scientist-farmer platform to co-develop practical solutions
✅ Access to funding, mentorship, and tools for scaling innovations
✅ A pipeline for translating research into market-ready solutions
At the heart of AGRIIP is a scientist-farmer partnership that ensures innovations are not just research-based but demand-driven, creating solutions tailored to real-world challenges. By supporting pioneering innovations like Soilless Veggy, AGRIIP will help move ideas beyond the lab and into fields, farms, and markets, where they can transform food security and livelihoods at scale.
Why Your Support Matters
Scaling AGRIIP in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya is urgent. These countries represent three of Africa’s most dynamic agricultural landscapes, home to millions of smallholder farmers who urgently need climate-resilient, affordable, and locally adaptable solutions.
🌍 With your support, we can:
🔹 Equip young African innovators with the skills, funding, and mentorship to scale their solutions
🔹 Empower farmers with affordable, science-driven tools to increase productivity and break the cycle of hunger and poverty
🔹 Build sustainable innovation ecosystems that drive long-term food system transformation across Africa
🚀 Join us in making AGRIIP a reality. Let’s build a food-secure, resilient, and prosperous Africa – together.
🔗 Be part of the movement. Support AGRIIP today by donating to our GoFundMe fundraising campaign.
Meet the Soilless Veggy team: Salifu Faisal (Biotechnologist at the UENR, Ghana), Alfred Balenor Buernor (PhD scholar, Morocco), Dr Adeyinka S. Adewumi (Plant breeder at IITA, Nigeria), and Emmanuel Osei Mensah (PhD researcher, University of Tsukuba, Japan)
