Christine Ager

In the soil beneath a Nairobi market, something useful was being wasted. Every day, tonnes of vegetable scraps, fruit peels, and organic refuse were carted off as garbage, a problem Christine Ager had decided to treat as a resource. Her answer was vermicomposting: putting earthworms to work breaking down that waste into rich organic fertilizer, and building an entire agribusiness ecosystem around that single, elegant idea.

A year after winning the 2nd runners up for the 2024 WAYA Women Empowerment Champion award, that idea had grown into something far larger than a fertilizer business.

Vermi-Farm Initiative had expanded from supporting just over 1,200 farmers to directly reaching more than 6,700 smallholder farmers across 12 new counties, 87% of them women, and 68% youth under 35. The team had more than doubled, from 7 to 15 employees, all of them under 35 and 11 of them women. Beyond the core team, over 250 part-time and seasonal jobs had been created through the construction and operation of Vermi-Farm’s DigiShamba smart greenhouse units.

The prize money seeded that growth deliberately. Christine directed it toward expanding production capacity, piloting a liquid fertilizer line called Vermiliquid, upgrading training infrastructure, and reinforcing the earthworm stocks and waste-processing systems at the heart of the operation. That initial investment helped attract further funding: a USD 50,000 grant from the Kenya Community Development Foundation, USD 20,000 from the Z Zurich Foundation, USD 8,000 from the Roddenberry Foundation, and USD 5,000 from VALUE4HER following a Global Inclusive Action Award win. Monthly revenues had risen 3.4 times over, from an average of KES 85,000 to KES 290,000.

What set Vermi-Farm apart was not scale alone but the way Christine had designed the model from the ground up to solve multiple problems at once. The Vermi-Farm Adapt Finance Program used a community table-banking structure to bring over 4,200 women across 130 rural self-help groups into a system where they could co-own greenhouse assets and access credit on terms that matched their actual seasonal realities. A down payment of roughly USD 210, just 20% of the cost of a DigiShamba unit, was enough to get a farming household into protected, precision agriculture. The results were striking: women who had been earning around KES 200 a week were reporting weekly incomes exceeding KES 17,000 after adopting the model.

Technology ran through every layer of the initiative. The second-generation DigiShamba greenhouse came equipped with IoT sensors monitoring soil moisture, temperature, and humidity in real time, with data delivered to farmers via USSD and WhatsApp. An AI-powered advisory chatbot, trained in local dialects and designed for low-literacy users, gave farmers timely guidance on crop schedules, pest outbreaks, and climate conditions. A blockchain-enabled payments platform, Vermi-Farm ePay, brought transparency to transactions across the supply chain. And gamified microlearning modules, accessible on basic phones, trained farmers in regenerative agriculture, bookkeeping, and greenhouse operations.

On the environmental side, the circular model was delivering measurable results. The DigiShamba greenhouses used up to 78% less water than conventional farming while increasing yields up to seven times. Vermicomposting kits being piloted in three counties were on track to reduce synthetic fertilizer use by over 45% among participating farmers. The initiative had also established 43 school gardens and registered 12 agricultural clubs in Kisumu County in partnership with Zero Hunger Activists, planting the values of regenerative farming in the next generation.

Christine’s own profile had grown alongside the initiative. By the one-year mark she had been selected as a 2025 Ignite African Women in Agribusiness Fellow, was mentoring 57 young women at the Ustawi Schools of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and had been featured in the Leading African Women in Food Fellowship Catalogue 2024. A full-page profile in The Nairobian had told the story of the Lamwe Self-Help Group’s transformation under the Vermi-Farm model, farmers whose weekly incomes had climbed from KES 200 to over KES 17,000.

From a Nairobi market’s worth of discarded vegetable matter, Christine Ager had built a model that was quietly rewriting what smallholder farming could look like for women across Kenya, and, in her sights, across East Africa.