Student group’s business plan could revolutionize Ethiopian farming, reduce poverty
A plan to create a portable threshing machine that could revolutionize farming in Ethiopia and help alleviate poverty in the country earned a San Diego State University team a first place award last weekend in a national business competition along with $100,000 in prize money and in-kind support.
![Teff Thresher]()
Michael Sloan, one of the team members and director of social entrepreneurship at SDSU’s Lavin Entrepreneurship Center, said the portable thresher has the potential of helping Ethiopia by creating jobs, empowering women, increasing food production and keeping children in school rather than working in the field.
“It’s going to reduce poverty for farmers, number one,” he said about the thresher, which could almost quadruple grain production and cut labor costs. “It will help reduce poverty for women. It will help get more food to people and it’ll improve their overall health in the villages.”
The idea for the thresher was suggested by Sloan’s former student Gemechu Abraham, who was born in Ethiopia and saw a need for it during a 2012 visit to Simbo, where his family once lived.
“In the village, I noticed very outdated farming techniques,” he said over the phone Tuesday from Beaverton, Oregon, where he grew up. “When I went back to the states, I was thinking of ways to change the circumstances. But being a broke college kid, I didn’t have a lot of funds to send back to Ethiopia.”
Threshers traditionally are large, expensive farming machines used to separate grain from stalks and husks. Although they were introduced in the 18th century, most Ethiopian farmers still use the old-fashioned method of separating grains by hand because they work on two-acre fields and can’t afford the large machines.
Sloan said the traditional method can take five people with livestock animals 14 hours to produce two pounds of grain.
The new thresher, about three feet high, require just two people to operate and produce 7.5 pounds of grain over that 14-hour period. Sloan said the new method also will be more sanitary because animals won’t be involved.
The prototype was created by head student engineer Dominick Polese and others in an SDSU mechanical engineering class.
The threshers will be used for teff, a nutritious grain grown by about 6.5 million farmers in Ethiopia. Despite the large number of farmers growing the grain, the inefficient threshing makes it such a low-yielding crop that Ethiopia has banned its exportation.
The plan calls for the thresher to be ready for production in Ethiopia by the end of the year. In the first year of production, the SDSU alumni-run company W.E. Do Good will sell 250 to 350 threshers to Ethiopian women for about $200 using micro loans, small loans aimed at supporting entrepreneurism and alleviating poverty, and then rent to about 3,000 farmers.
The idea made a splash last Friday and Saturday at the Richard Barrentine Values and Ventures Business Plan Competition held at Texas Christian University. The SDSU College of Business Administration team of Sloan, Abraham and management student Peter Morrill competed against 48 other teams from universities and took home first prize along with $25,000 in prize money and $75,000 in support from business sponsors.
Morrill made presentations to two panels over the two days. On the second day, Morrill said a panel that included presidents and CEOs of large companies drilled him with challenging questions, including one about why the student company proposing the idea wasn’t a nonprofit.
“They were trying to trick me,” said Morrill, who came prepared for any question. “They know that’s not a good idea. To make this a nonprofit, you’d have to rely on donations. If we can make a profit, we can put all that money back into the company. We’re relying on making money to make more jobs.”
Abraham, a 2012 graduate who attended SDSU on a soccer scholarship, said he always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but had not considered social entrepreneurism, which focuses on solving societal problems, until returning from his trip to Ethiopia and enrolling in Sloan’s class.
“Professor Sloan inspired me to think more social than profitable,” he said about his former teacher, who has spent more than 15 years working with underserved communities in the U.S.
Abraham formed the venture W.E. Do Good — short for World Entrepreneurs Doing Good — while at SDSU with a goal of building a school in Ethiopia, which still is in the works.
“I was very distraught to see kids learning under trees as well as classrooms where the rooftops were made out of tarps,” he said about what he saw on his first trip to Ethiopia. “I had all my education here in the United States, and I had never been exposure to such dire situations. I was very heartbroken to see kids in 2012 learning under such circumstances.”
Abraham also was disturbed to learn that many students and their families live in huts that are lighted by kerosene lanterns, which have unhealthy fumes and can cause homes to burn down if knocked over.
His first successful social entrepreneurism project at the school raised funds to provide 200 solar lights to Simbo.
The idea for the thresher came after discussing other possible projects with Sloan. After the prototype was tested on Teff grown on campus, Abraham returned to Ethiopia to field test it in three villages around Simbo over six weeks early this year. The San Diego-based global nonprofit Project Concern International is helping obtain grants for the project and has assisted W.E. Do Good in working with the Ethiopian government.
SDSU mechanical engineering students this semester are working on a new prototype that will be larger and user fewer parts.
[utsandiego]
