Cowtribe
Model & Strategy
CowTribe is a Ghana-based for-profit organization focused on supporting livestock farmers via a mobile platform that aggregates demand for livestock farming inputs and services, starting with vaccinations and veterinary services. By inexpensively and efficiently aggregating the needs of individual farmers, CowTribe’s mobile platform restores market incentives for veterinarians and suppliers to service rural communities, bringing critical goods and services to last mile farmers. CowTribe also uses their platform to engage livestock farmers on best practices in animal husbandry, and provides immediate SMS warnings of disease outbreaks and dangerous weather events, mitigating their potential impact.
CowTribe is led by Peter Awin, Co-Founder and CEO, and Alima Bawah, Co-Founder and COO. Prior to CowTribe, Peter founded a company to support high growth African startups, and then joined WorldCover, a crop insurance social enterprise. Alima was a journalist focusing on documenting the struggles of rural women in Ghana. She is the recent recipient of an Obama Foundation African Leaders fellowship. Both founders were born and raised in Ghana and have personal experiences that have led them to this work.
Impact
By the end of 2019, Cowtribe had served 37,241 farmers in 376 communities in northern Ghana. Cowtribe also secured contracts with the Government of Ghana and global alliances to reach 90,000 new farmers by 2021, and aim to reach one million farmers by 2025.
In less than three years, vaccine coverage among Cowtribe users has improved from 18% to 73%, and early data shows annual livestock mortalities decreasing rapidly—in some communities from 50% to less than 5%.
Farmers using the Cowtribe service—many of whom were living on less than $1 per day—have been able to add an estimated $300+ to their annual household income.
