Inside Safi Organics: How entrepreneur Joyce Kamande is turning farm waste into fertilizer

A rice husk is usually what remains after the useful part of the harvest has gone.

For Joyce Kamande and Safi Organics, it is where another story begins.

The Kenyan entrepreneur is the co-founder and Chief Operations Officer of Safi Organics, a fertilizer company that uses agricultural waste, including rice husks, to produce carbon-rich soil inputs.

Since its founding in 2015, the company has grown from an experiment around farm waste into a business serving thousands of farmers across Kenya.

The entrepreneur dream

Kamande's route into agribusiness did not begin with a conventional agriculture degree.

She holds a Master's degree in Procurement and Logistics from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, a background that fits surprisingly well with one of Safi Organics' biggest ideas: fertilizer is not only a farming problem.

It is also a logistics problem.

Much of the fertiliser used by African farmers is produced in large, centralised facilities and then transported to farming regions.

Every kilometre, middleman and logistical layer can add to the final price paid by the farmer.

Safi Organics is working from the opposite direction.

Instead of moving fertilizer across long distances, the company uses locally available agricultural waste and technology designed for smaller, decentralized production.

The ambition is simple: make it possible for fertilizer manufacturing to happen closer to the communities that need it.

Rice husks, pure magic

Rice-growing regions produce large volumes of husks that can become an environmental burden if poorly disposed of or burned.

Safi Organics converts biomass into fertilizer and biochar-based soil products designed to improve soil health, including helping address soil acidity and nutrient retention.

The company says its decentralized model can reduce logistical costs while helping farmers increase yields by up to 30 per cent.

Its own figures vary by reporting period, with Safi currently stating that it serves more than 20,000 farmers.

That is where Kamande's work becomes bigger than a fertiliser brand.

The model links waste management, rural manufacturing, employment and agricultural productivity in one chain.

A material with little value after harvest can become an input for the next crop.

Global influence

Kamande's work has taken her well beyond Kenya's agricultural circles.

She has been a Mandela Washington Fellow, a Thought For Food Fellow and an MIT Legatum Foundry Fellow.

She has also been recognised through international entrepreneurship and leadership platforms, including One Young World, while her work with Safi Organics has placed her among prominent women building businesses around agriculture and climate solutions.

In 2024, Safi Organics also won KEPSA's SME Innovation Excellence Award as the overall business winner, adding to a company recognition record that includes the MIT Food and Agribusiness Prize, the Total Startupper award and the EarthX Climate Tech Prize.

But awards are perhaps the least interesting part of Kamande's story.

The real test sits with the farmer.

Unconventional ideas on factory

The traditional image of a factory is a large building somewhere far away.

Safi Organics is betting on something different:

Smaller production systems located closer to agricultural communities, using local feedstock and labour.

MIT has described Safi's production facilities as capable of profitably supplying thousands of farmers within roughly 20 miles.

That approach could matter in a country where the cost and availability of fertilizer can quickly affect planting decisions and, eventually, food production.

For Kamande, the work sits at the meeting point of her academic background and Safi's wider mission.

She is helping build a company that looks at a rice husk and sees fertiliser; looks at a rural community and sees a potential manufacturing base; and looks at a farmer's soil problem as something that cannot always be solved by importing another bag from far away.

The bigger idea behind Joyce Kamande and Safi Organics may therefore be less about waste.

The distance between the farm and the factory.

And, what could happen if Kenya began making more of what its farmers need closer to where they actually grow the food.