BlueHarvest is an early-stage Kenyan venture tackling one of East Africa's most persistent problems: the enormous share of harvested produce that never reaches a paying market. Kenya loses an estimated 35% of its mango crop after harvest, and across the coast, fish and seaweed face similarly high spoilage rates. The cause is rarely a lack of produce. It is the absence of affordable, reliable preservation infrastructure. Open-air drying, the default method for most smallholders, fisherfolk and cooperatives, leads to contamination, inconsistent quality and spoilage that locks producers out of higher-value markets, locally and internationally.
The technology to solve this already exists and has been proven in Kenya. An off-grid, solar-powered drying and ice system was piloted on Kenya's south coast from 2018 to 2024, through Fraunhofer ISE, the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute, and the Technical University of Mombasa. Handed over to a coastal community in 2023, it confirmed that solar-hybrid drying, combining photovoltaic power with solar-thermal storage for continuous operation, works reliably for fish, seaweed, fruit and vegetables alike. Its own documented finding was telling: producers could not convert better-quality dried product into better income, because no market-access model was built around the technology. The gap was never the dryer. It was the business model.
We are building BlueHarvest to close that gap: shared, off-grid solar drying equipment on a pay-per-batch or cooperative-subscription basis, the access model smallholders and women-led self-help groups can actually afford, rather than costly equipment ownership. This lets communities convert locally available produce, starting with mangoes, into shelf-stable, value-added products, with baobab, fish and seaweed as natural extensions given our coastal and dryland geography. The model combines local sourcing, food processing, brand development and digital customer acquisition to build a scalable food-processing business, with a clear pathway toward export markets.
BlueHarvest builds on an existing foundation, not a blank page. Since October 2025, our founder, through InspCorp, a technology transfer startup she co-founded, has worked directly with 200 women in Kaembeni, a semi-arid community in rural Kilifi County, through FreshRain to implement the Clean Water, Clean Income programme. These women are trained, organised into 10 legally registered self-help groups, and already running micro-enterprises. The next phase builds a mini water-bottling plant, using FreshRain to safely treat rainwater for household drinking water and income from surplus sales, then transitions the women into regenerative agriculture, restoring soil and water resilience. BlueHarvest's processing layer follows, to prevent the post-harvest losses that would otherwise undermine that progress.
We are also building toward a wider research and innovation ecosystem, hoping to connect with BOKU:BASE, the innovation and entrepreneurship unit of BOKU University, Vienna, and IAESTE Austria, linking Kenyan and Austrian students and researchers directly with the women in the field. This reflects a wider Kenya–Austria bridge our founder is building, including participation in this year’s AGYLE programme connecting young African and European leaders in Berlin, Germany.
Founder
BlueHarvest is founded by Hope Mwanake, a Kenyan entrepreneur and PhD candidate at BOKU's Institute of Hydrology and Water Management, whose doctoral research links agricultural land use to sediment yield, water quality and management in a transboundary river basin shared by Kenya and Uganda. Before her doctorate, she co-founded Eco Blocks and Tiles, Kenya's first company manufacturing roofing tiles from recycled plastic and glass waste, featured by Al Jazeera and Reuters, converting over 200 tonnes of plastic into more than 200,000 tiles for over 100 homes and businesses. In 2018 she co-founded InspCorp, a research-based technology transfer social enterprise developing difference-making technologies in energy and food security, environmental conservation and economic revitalisation.
Where we are
BlueHarvest is at the validation stage. We are testing willingness to pay with self-help groups, cooperatives and aggregators before any equipment investment, with a planned first pilot, a mini solar dehydrator on school grounds in Kaembeni, timed to the mango season. No equipment is purchased until clear evidence of demand is in hand. We are seeking partners in food, trade, impact investment, research and technical mentorship to help build an evidence-based, women-led model for preventing post-harvest loss and turning it into real income for coastal and dryland communities in Kenya, with the long-term ambition of growing into export markets, including Austria and the wider EU.