The Creating Shared Prize, established in 2010, is a global competition aimed at searching for leading innovations focused on creating shared value, high impact, and lasting change in communities. In the initiative, Nestlé has partnered with Ashoka, the world’s leading network of systems-changing social entrepreneurs, to search for, support and accelerate solutions tackling the biggest issues in water, nutrition and rural development.
This year’s competition had over 1000 entries from Africa, Asia, Europe , the Americas and Middle East. There we 56 organisations shortlisted globally. The four Kenyan enterprises which were shortlisted include TruTrade, Farmers Pride, SimGas Kenya and Amref Kenya’s Leap.
Farmers Pride
Farmers Pride provides rural smallholder farmers with timely and relevant quality farm inputs, services and information at affordable prices through comprehensive and innovative franchise model of agro dealers. The business model integrates farmer field extension and education services, quality agricultural inputs sales and distribution, Farmer market linkages, financial services, soil testing services and farmer insurance services to offer a reinforced platform for rural social and economic development.
Leap
Leap is a mhealth platform created by Amref Health Africa. It started out as the Health Enablement and Learning Platform (HELP) Project that has to date successfully trained over 3,000 Community Health Workers (CHWs) in Kenya, drawn from urban, rural and nomadic sites. mLearning through Leap has enabled Amref to complement initial face to face training, enabling the health workers to learn at their own pace, at their own time using their own mobile devices while in their communities. It delivers approved Ministry of Health curricula through a combination of text and audio messages, making it accessible through basic mobile phones.
SimGas Kenya
SimGas provides biogas-powered milk chilling solutions that enable off-grid dairy farmers to store, deliver and sell the highest possible quantity of milk. The cooler has a cooling capacity between 2.5 and 10 Liters which is sufficient for over 80% of all dairy farmers in East Africa. It also enables the milk to cool fast that is from 35ºC to 7ºC within 4 hours which is faster than a household fridge.
TruTrade
TruTrade is a social enterprise that provides smallholder farmers with a reliable route to market and fair prices for their produce. TruTrade provides an alternative to the buy-low-sell-high trading practice common in agricultural value chains in Africa. They do this by
increasing smallholder farmer incomes and build their confidence to invest in production, Create rural employment opportunities, in particular for youth as village agents and enabling agribusinesses to source sustainably.
Winners in the competition have a chance to win Ksh. 54 Million, a trip to the 2018 World Water Forum in Brasilia; an opportunity to pitch live to the Nestlé Creating Shared Value Council; an impact-focused boot camp run by Ashoka; and a chance to fast track to social investment in an Ashoka Accelerator