Hello Savanna — Impact Spotlight

5 min readMay 29, 2022

What challenge is Hello Savanna tackling ?

Hello Savanna is tackling declining local food production capacities and rising food insecurity caused by climate change, political instability and inequitable global financial models

Africa’s current food system is chaotic and fragmented, resulting in more than 40% post harvest losses. Small-scale farmers are extremely poor and vulnerable in the current system. They lack fair access to consumer markets and tools/investments to cultivate readily available land.

Consumers on the other hand have zero visibility into the origin, quality or journey of the food they purchase. World events and climate change are causing a rise in food prices.

Africa’s current food system lacks transparency and an equitable food supply chain connecting fresh food producers with vendors and consumers.

What solution does Hello Savanna provide ?

A digitally and vertically enabled platform to bring order and integration to the food value chain. The platform will ensure digital transparency, traceability and equity throughout the value chain to provide immutable truth.

It aims at giving smallholder farmers visibility and empowering them to be active participants in serving consumers and their communities. It also enables consumers to be proactive in their food choices and participate in the indigenous food narrative along with small scale farmers.

The farm-to-fork solution proposed by Hello Savanna has the following features:

It is smallholder farmer centric with resources and guidance catered to improve their ability to grow healthy crops.
A gradual transition from conventional to regenerative agriculture which improves soil health, improves crop diversity and is more sustainability-focused in the long term.
Local first-mile pick at farm source up and last-mile drop off to consumers, ensures that the food supply chain is transparent and traceable.

Why is the project important and what do we like about it?

Acute food insecurity in Africa has increased by over 60% since 2020 making projects enabling food resilience like Hello Savanna key.

Key drivers of the accelerating food insecurity crisis in Africa include transportation, climate events like flooding and locusts, conflict and displacement. COVID19 has also intensified the fragility of certain countries. Over 100 million Africans are facing imminent emergency or catastrophic levels of food insecurity and the situation is expected to worsen.

Hello Savanna’s presence in Mali contributes to addressing this crisis. Mali is on the list of African countries facing the greatest increase in food insecurity resulting from increased imported food costs, increased fuel costs and global food disruption exacerbated by the war in Europe but not only. The current political situation resulting in sanctions is contributing to food insecurity. Between 2019 and 2020, there was a 6.2 million increase in the population facing acute food insecurity.

Hello Savanna also enables investing in the development of a more sustainable and nutritious food system in Mali by securing the supply chain from farm-to-fork

Mali is a low-income, food deficient country with poor agricultural sector performance. FAO notes that Mali’s agriculture accounts for more than 35 percent of GDP and 80 percent of livelihoods. However, it is primarily based on agropastoralism and the northern part of the country is mostly challenged by drought, desertification and population migration.

Hello Savanna applies an agroforestry model that financially incentivises small-scale farmers to sequester carbon in both trees and soil. They are encouraging the development of a local food production system that reduces dependence on importation of expensive produce from Europe.

The project is also securing the food value chain from farm-to-fork by owning the farms, employing small-scale farmers, introducing regenerative agriculture principles and handling distribution. By doing so, Savanna wants to achieve 4 main goals:

Attract low-risk financial instruments for small scale farmers
Reduce risk profile of agricultural land
Supply-chain transparency from source to consumer
Reduce mass migration from rural areas and youth farmers and agricultural specialists to rural areas

Finally Hello Savana builds a food ecosystem that benefits both farmers and consumers

West Africa is rapidly urbanizing and nearly half of the region’s population dwells in cities. Data indicates that a rapidly emerging middle class prefers convenience, processed food and perishables in the diets of both urban and rural consumers. Processed food has 60% penetration in urban Mali compared to 48% in rural Mali. This necessitates developing a food ecosystem that can improve diet quality and provide nutrients via fresh vegetables and fruits with important nutrients.

Hello Savanna is initiating such a food system through an integrated digital food platform that enables ‘low-cost’ management of the supply-chains and contributes to improving the quality of the perishables category which includes fresh fruits and vegetables.

Furthermore, the project has identified that lack of diversification in food systems affects both farmers and consumers in various ways. At the farm level it takes the form of degradation of soil health, less yield productivity over cropping seasons and nutrient depletion. At the consumer level, it results in poorer diet quality and fewer fresh food choices.

What are the main concerns? Are there any key negative externalities that need to be addressed for this project?

The main concern for Hello S avanna is controlling negative externalities that are likely to emerge from agricultural activities. These include:

Soil exhaustion and over use of uncontrolled chemical fertilizers
Excessive water consumption for irrigation
Biodiversity depletion
Fossil fuel trucks for food distribution
Fossil fuel generated electricity for off-grid locations.

Hello Savannah has factored in these negative externalities and has already implemented solutions to address these concerns. These include the following steps:

Adopting regenerative farming instead on heavy chemical agricultural inputs
Adopting plant root responsive irrigation technologies from instead of surface watering or drop irrigation.
Encourage crop companionship and biodiversity cohabitation -requiring a minimum of 20 different species per farm and preference for indigenous crops.
As soon as possible transition from fossil fuels trucks to electrical vehicles
Adopt solar PV and Battery Energy Storage solutions for all facilities.

Any follow-up questions? Want to talk directly to the founders?

Please, join their dedicated Discord channel: https://discord.gg/Eggq6DPCM8

About Cardashift

Cardashift enables citizens-investors to build the world of tomorrow.

Our first product is a community-run launchpad that raises funds, builds, and accelerates startups that are solving social and environmental issues. Cardashift is based on Cardano, the blockchain platform for change-makers, innovators, and visionaries.