Daniella Ushindi

From an early age, Ushindi has been driven by an all-consuming passion for community volunteering. This experience has profoundly influenced her perception of society and inspired her to make a significant contribution to its development. With a degree in Economics and Management from the Université Libre des Pays de Grands Lacs (ULPGL/Goma), she felt the need to channel her passion for volunteering into an entrepreneurial career. She was convinced she had the skills and expertise to share, and to meet the needs of the agricultural and food value chain. This aligned with working alongside local communities and making a significant contribution to the sector’s development; therefore, ChemChemAgro was born.

ChemChem, meaning “spring” in Swahili, symbolizes the wellspring of knowledge and resources Ushindi aims to provide. The start-up began with forty bark hives, an improvised “Apiary school”. Yields were erratic; storms and pesticide drift could wipe out colonies overnight. So she built API Connect, a low-cost sensor network that texts humidity, temperature and chemical-drift alerts to keepers every 15 minutes.

Today, the company addresses the under-exploitation of the beekeeping sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo, solving challenges like traditional hives, insufficient honey production and environmental impacts. Ushindi’s holistic approach includes sustainable beekeeping practices, the Apiary school, a pollination nursery and the API Connect technology platform which, beyond providing beekeepers with crucial information on optimal hive locations and pesticide risks, also facilitates honey trading and a collaborative network for reporting incidents. Under the “Miel du Volcan” brand, ChemChemAgro markets its honey, guaranteeing quality and traceability. The company’s efforts align with multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as improving food security, promoting sustainable agriculture, and combating climate change.

In Comes WAYA

By 2024, Ushindi’s API platform was monitoring 100 hives but growing painfully slowly (due to the conflicts, North Kivu’s roads close as often as they open). Cash for more sensors, modern hives and field technicians was scarce, and every week a fresh roadblock or fuel shock threatened to snuff out momentum.

So when she heard that AGRA’s VALUE4HER initiative was looking for bold, women-led agribusinesses for the Women Agripreneurs of the Year Awards (WAYA), she filled her application at midnight in a café running on a generator. WAYA is a recognition initiative launched by AGRA to highlight and support African female agripreneurs. The awards celebrate women who have excelled in the agricultural value chains, demonstrating innovation and contributing to food security, climate resilience, and the empowerment of women and youth. One of the categories awarded is the Resilience and Inspiration Leader, recognizing female agripreneurs from marginalized communities or vulnerable and hard-to-reach areas who, despite facing significant challenges demonstrate unwavering determination, strength, and perseverance to excel in agribusiness.

Six months after her application submission, at a global stage during the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali Rwanda, the improbable announcement was made: Ushindi was the winner of the Resilience & Inspirational Category, beating over 1500 applicants. With this recognition came prize money of USD 25,000, and she was also inducted into a Women Accelerator Mentorship Program ran by FAO and the International Agri-Food Network. She was paired with one of the leading women leaders at Bayer AG, whose role was to guide her in her business journey.

The cash prize was modest by venture-Capital standards, but to Ushindi it has been rocket fuel. The money went straight into scale. Fifty new IoT sensors and 600 top-bar hives rolled out across Lubero and Masisi; API Connect’s reach jumped to 260 beekeepers, 60% of them women. Colony losses fell 22%, and annual honey income for adopters doubled to about US $420, transformative in a province where the average person lives on less than two dollars a day.

ChemChemAgro’s payroll swelled from nine to twenty-eight youth jobs, creating the region’s first cohort of hive fabricators and sensor technicians. Pollination now blankets more than 300 ha of beans, coffee and maize, nudging yields upward for farmers who have never touched a smart-phone but can now trace a healthy pod-set to the hum of a nearby hive.

Today Ushindi is planning a “Honey Bank”, three bulking centers that will pay women cash on delivery, and a QR-coded API Card to certify sustainable practice and unlock micro-loans. She still navigates insecure checkpoints and patchy cell towers, but the WAYA win has turned her proof-of-concept into a movement. “Bees are small,” she says, “yet they hold an ecosystem together. I just needed a push to show the same is true for women entrepreneurs.”

Other Achievements

ChemChem Agro’s achievements are the fruit of ongoing commitment and have been recognized on several occasions. In addition to WAYA, Ushindi won the Youth Ecopreneur Scholar (YECO 2024) and the company emerged as the winner of the Land Accelerator Africa 2021 program, a finalist in the AgriPitch Competition 2022 program, and a finalist in the AWA Awards 2023 program. These awards are testament to their dedication of innovation, sustainable development and positive impact in the agricultural sector. Ushindi and the team at ChemChemAgro continue to believe in the power of agriculture and tech to transform communities and environments. Their journey is tangible proof that passion, combined with perseverance and commitment to the common good, can create opportunity and real change.