TED Fellow Su Kahumbu is working to improve farmer livelihoods and contribute to nutritional security and environmental sustainability.

Why you should listen

Su Kahumbu creates cool mobile phone agriculture solutions for small holder farmers in Africa. Her solutions target improved climate resilient production methods that deliver on sustainable human, animal, crop and ecosystem health. 

Kahumbu latest baby is her award winning app, iCow, which is a comprehensive mobile phone based agricultural platform that provides farmers easy access to cutting edge sustainable agricultural knowledge, markets and experts. iCow is designed for low-end feature phones, helping users that aren't connected to the internet access to a database of rich offline content which they receive in SMS, 24/7 in languages of their choice. It comprises comprehensive content  on livestock, crops, soils, pollinators, insects and more and is currently used by thousands of small holder farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia in five local languages.

Kahumbu is a passionate social entrepreneur with 21 years experience of working with small holder farmers and organic farming systems in Kenya. Her goal is to inspire, enable and support farming communities across Africa by making farming sexy.

Kahumbu is based in Nairobi, Kenya where she heads Green Dreams Tech Ltd as the CEO. She is a TED Global Fellow, an advisory board member for Changing Course in Global Agriculture and the agricultural governor of the Mpesa Foundation Academy.

Su Kahumbu’s TED talk

More news and ideas from Su Kahumbu

Live from TEDGlobal 2017

To engage joyfully with the world: More bold ideas from the TED Fellows

August 28, 2017

“The politics of joy” is a phrase that resonates through this session of TED Fellows talks. These talks, by and large, come from people who’ve taken a hard look at the world and its problems and decided to engage joyfully, with creativity, fresh insight and heart. From a soccer project that empowers young refugees, to […]

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Q&A

Udder genius: Fellows Friday with Su Kahumbu

January 20, 2012

Agriculturalist and social entrepreneur Su Kahumbu created iCow, a mobile app that supports farmers caring for livestock. Soon it will become an information-delivery platform that could help generate a whole new crop of young farmers. What does iCow do? The iCow application essentially reminds small-scale dairy farmers in Kenya of important periods in gestation. This […]

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