How PABRA helped Imara Tech turn innovation into jobs and hope for thousands
Since 2018, PABRA has been partnering with local innovators in Tanzania to address post-harvest challenges. Imara Tech transformed Multi-Crop Threshers into affordable machines, empowering women, creating jobs, and improving farmer livelihoods.
- Agricultural Innovation
- crops
- Ethiopia
- farmers
How PABRA helped Imara Tech turn innovation into jobs and hope for thousands
Since 2018, PABRA has been partnering with local innovators in Tanzania to address post-harvest challenges. Imara Tech transformed Multi-Crop Threshers into affordable machines, empowering women, creating jobs, and improving farmer livelihoods.
The harvest had always been the hardest part. For countless farming families across Tanzania, bringing crops from the field was only half the battle. The real struggle began after harvest, when women spent hours, sometimes days, threshing beans by hand. The work was physically exhausting, often leaving them with chronic back pain, while poor post-harvest handling led to significant grain losses and reduced incomes. For many young people, agriculture offered little promise beyond hard labour.
Today, that picture is fast changing, thanks to a youth-led enterprise whose journey began with a simple idea and the support of the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) Program of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.
From selling just six machines, Imara Technology Ltd has grown into one of East Africa's leading manufacturers of Multi-Crop Threshers, with more than 1,000 machines now working across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Behind that remarkable growth lies a story of research, innovation, entrepreneurship and partnerships working together to improve lives.