Kuza

Empowering livelihoods by revolutionizing rural businesses and sustainable farming practices for Small Holder Farmers

Across sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers form the backbone of rural economies — yet they remain among the most underserved and economically invisible people in the system. Most lack access to quality inputs, reliable credit, and markets, while government extension services are stretched far beyond capacity. The result is a cycle of low productivity, high post-harvest losses, and limited opportunity. Meanwhile, rural youth, who could be a resource, are largely unemployed and underutilised. The energy, the people, and the community spaces are there. What is missing is a way to organise them usefully.

About the organisation

Kuza operates at the intersection of informal livelihoods and system gaps, focusing on communities where formal services have limited reach. Their early work spanned sectors such as health, WASH, retail, and construction, engaging with small and micro enterprises across rural contexts. A consistent insight emerged: most rural households depend on agriculture, not just as an economic activity, but as the foundation of income, nutrition, education, and overall well-being.Shaped by this understanding, Kuza’s approach treats farmers not as participants in a single value chain, but as individuals within households with interconnected needs across credit, inputs, markets, and knowledge. Addressing these requires a horizontal model. Kuza operationalises this through its agripreneur model, training rural youth as technology-enabled, community-trusted entrepreneurs who connect farmers to multiple services through a single relationship.

Kuza has reached over 6 million young people, supported 253,000 small businesses, and contributed to the creation of 155,000 jobs across Africa and Asia. An independent study by the World Bank Kenya and AgriFin (2022–23) found that 97% of farmers reported improvements in their quality of life. Beyond direct delivery, Kuza acts as an ecosystem orchestrator, enabling coordination across governments, agri-techs, and private sector actors. This is reflected in the EKYAN initiative (Engaging Kenyan Youth in Agriculture and Nutrition), co-created with UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited. The model anchors youth agripreneurs in public schools, turning them into hubs for climate-smart agriculture, nutrition education, and market access, and offering a scalable pathway to address youth employment, food security, and climate resilience.

Sriram Bharatam
Founder

Headquarters: Kenya
Geographies: Africa & Asia
Domains: Livelihoods

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Journey of Exponential Change

Kuza achieved significant scale early on, reaching millions of farmers and deploying thousands of agripreneurs, with impact validated by institutions such as the World Bank. This growth revealed a deeper question: how to move from scaling programmes to shaping the system itself.

Kuza’s model was rooted in a horizontal view of the farmer as part of a household with interconnected needs across credit, inputs, nutrition, and markets. The agripreneur model translated this into practice, creating trusted, local nodes capable of delivering multiple services through a single relationship. As scale increased, a structural constraint became clear. While Kuza operated as a multi-sector network, external systems continued to function in silos. What Kuza had built was not a single-sector solution, but a distributed network enabling flows across services, actors, and markets.

This led to a strategic shift toward building open infrastructure. The focus moved from direct delivery to enabling flows of knowledge, finance, inputs, and produce across an ecosystem of participants. This approach materialised in OneNetwork, built on the Beckn Protocol, enabling diverse actors to transact on shared digital rails. The model is operational in Kenya, with early signs of systemic traction, including national-level adoption pathways and recognition as a reference for open agricultural networks.