About 14 years ago I bought a book. And in that book I found a seed.
Nestled in one chapter was an intriguing story about a simple solution to solve the problem of
delivering medical services to remote regions in the mountains as efficiently as possible. The
system could be used by all the medics across the country in real time and collected data through
a central data base ensuring optimization of follow on medical responses. It worked on low end
phones.
At that time I was percolating the idea of solving a gaping problem I could see in Kenya. Over the
course of the previous 10 years I’d built an organic business, it included farming and teaching
farmers to farm organically. During this time it became clearly apparent that our Kenyan extension
service was lagging behind population growth and most farmers were simply winging it and
national food security was increasingly at risk.
My own experience in winging it on my farm had left me extremely frustrated, thirsty for
agricultural knowledge and desperate to share what I learned and learn from others too. As my
business grew, I became deeply passionate about farmer education
The seed from that book opened up a whole new horizon of possibilities base around delivering a
service at scale over low end phones.
I consider this seed as being instrumental in my path and development of iCow
The book was called Fortunes At the Bottom of the Pyramid, written by no other than C.K
Prahalad.