MTN Uganda, in partnership with Worldwide Fund For Nature (WWF) Uganda, will this weekend send the winners of the inaugural Pachi Panda Innovation Challenge to South Africa for the continental finals. This article takes a closer look at one of the winning innovations, FarmGate Digital exploring the idea behind the solution and its potential for the communities it serves.
FarmGate Digital, Uganda’s national winner, will now advance to the continental finals in South Africa, where it will compete with innovators from Zambia, Nigeria, Cameroon and the host nation for a pan-African award. The startup received Shs 15 million for its national victory, in recognition of a solution targeting one of Uganda’s least visible yet increasingly urgent environmental pressures.
Across Kampala’s sprawling open-air markets, trucks and baskets of fruits, potatoes and vegetables routinely fail to reach consumers. Instead, large volumes are left to rot in open piles, releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas and eroding incomes along the value chain.
For Ruth Kyobutungi, founder of FarmGate Digital, these daily losses were both a frustration and a catalyst for rethinking how food markets function.
“In Uganda, an estimated 30 to 40 percent of fruits and vegetables are lost after harvest,” she says. “In Kampala alone, more than 1,000 tonnes of food are discarded every week from major markets, where rotting organic waste releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas.”
Kyobutungi says the idea for FarmGate Digital emerged from repeatedly observing the same cycle play out across urban and peri-urban markets.
“Food is grown, transported and handled with enormous effort, yet still ends up wasted, while many households continue to struggle with poor nutrition,” she says.
FarmGate Digital does not seek to increase agricultural output. Instead, it intervenes where losses are most acute—after harvest—when weak coordination, limited storage and opaque pricing systems turn edible food into waste and lock farmers into distress sales.
Kyobutungi describes the solution as “a market coordination and food preservation system that connects pricing, quality and storage into one operating model,” designed to work within existing food systems rather than replace them.
Rather than positioning itself as a standalone mobile application, FarmGate is being built as a wider market system that integrates digital tools with human support and physical infrastructure. Alongside a smartphone application currently under development, the platform will include a USSD interface, enabling farmers with basic feature phones to participate using simple codes.
Trained field agents will provide on-the-ground support for farmers who need assistance, while a dedicated website will connect buyers, partners and institutions to the ecosystem. For now, the model is being tested through simulations and a web-based backend managed by people, allowing the system to be refined before significant capital is deployed.
“We track what food exists, its quality and how long it can remain edible, then match it to buyers who can use it in time,” Kyobutungi explains. “Prices adjust based on freshness and demand, rather than guesswork.”
Farmers share basic information about their harvest including crop type, volume, harvest timing and storage conditions via smartphone, USSD or with help from an agent. The system assigns a freshness score, dynamically adjusts prices as time passes, and recommends the most viable bids to farmers.
Unlike digital platforms that simply list prices or connect buyers and sellers, FarmGate integrates market data with physical storage solutions. These include short-term, solar-powered cold storage and redistribution pathways that redirect food nearing spoilage to secondary markets, processors or institutions instead of landfills.
“FarmGate actively manages how food moves before it becomes waste,” Kyobutungi says.
The timing of the intervention is critical. Climate volatility is disrupting harvest cycles, while rapid urbanisation is placing growing pressure on informal food markets that were never designed to handle today’s volumes.
“As climate shocks intensify and cities grow, reducing food system waste has become one of the fastest and most overlooked opportunities for climate action,” she adds.
FarmGate Digital remains in prototyping and pilot testing, but early signals suggest shifts in farmer behaviour and market outcomes.
“Farmers receiving price and timing signals are delaying distress sales, experiencing fewer rejections and showing strong demand for short-term storage,” Kyobutungi says.
Pilot data and comparable interventions indicate the model could reduce food loss by 10 to 20 percent among active users, while helping farmers recover 18 to 25 percent of income typically lost to underpricing, keeping more nutritious food in circulation and improving household resilience.
While technology underpins the system, Kyobutungi argues the core innovation lies in its design rather than the tools alone.
“We use data to coordinate timing, quality, pricing and storage decisions across farmers, buyers and markets,” she says, noting that the system is intentionally built to function across smartphones, feature phones and agent networks.
As FarmGate prepares for the continental finals in South Africa, Kyobutungi says the model is designed to scale without erasing local realities. “African food systems are highly local,” she says. “Our strength is not assuming uniformity, but building something that adapts.”
By focusing on waste rather than output, FarmGate reflects a broader shift in African climate innovation one that prioritises redesigning how food systems function, improving incomes, reducing emissions and strengthening urban food security, rather than simply digitising existing inefficiencies.
MTN Group launched the Pachi Panda Innovation Challenge in Zambia in 2022, aligned with MTN’s Now Beyond Ambition 2025 strategy, which centres on digital innovation, sustainability and shared value creation.
