Updates from our Grantees

At Indigo, we’re always keen to hear from our grantees and learn from their experiences. It’s for this reason that we recently sent out a survey to all our grantees to ask them of their experience working with Indigo, the challenges and successes their projects have faced and where they see their organisations in five years’ time. Here are just a few thoughts, reflections and pieces of feedback that we’ve received so far:

• iCow, one of our most popular grants, has gone from strength to strength over the last 12 months. Not only was it profiled on the BBC back in 2010, it was also voted one of the Best African Mobile Apps by Forbes. It’s not bad going for a small, young start-up. The iCow team have also recently conducted their own survey that shows 40% of farmers using the system have seen an increase in milk yields of 2-4 litres per cow.  Here is just one farmer’s story to come out of the recent survey:

David, a farmer from Bomet County  has six mature cows and four calves. When the iCow team initially spoke to him in August, his cows were producing an average of 14 litres of milk per day. As of January this year, his yield has increased by at least 4 litres, which he sells for 23 shillings per litre. He says iCow has really helped him especially in the area of feeding his dairy cows well and he now has fodder crops.

• During the recent Nigerian fuel subsidy protests, Zubair Abubakar’s Nigerian Constitution App received an estimated 40,000 downloads, causing him to exceed his server’s bandwidth. At present, Zubair is developing the app to work on even more phones and even has plans to develop future versions of the app in multiple languages, thereby making it accessible to those who don’t read English. On a continent with more than 2,000 languages, ensuring equal accessibility for all is a very real challenge and will require some innovative solutions in the years ahead.
• TEDx Dzorwulu, meanwhile, tackled gender stereotypes by hosting their event with a majority female audience. It’s a clear and welcome demonstration that technology, innovation and entrepreneurship are not male-only domains.

This is just a snapshot of responses we’ve received so far and hopefully we’ll have plenty more anecdotes and insights to share over the coming weeks. If you are one of our grantees and haven’t yet filled in the survey, we look forward to hearing from you shortly and finding out how you’ve been getting on.