‘Hunger drove me to found fast-growing tech startup’

The memory of hunger is what Oscar Ekponimo used to become who he is today… It all began, sometime between the year 1997 and 2000, when Oscar Ekponimo’s father had a partial stroke. Feeding became difficult in his home and young Ekponimo developed a desire to do something with his future, to empower people and […]

The memory of hunger is what Oscar Ekponimo used to become who he is today…

It all began, sometime between the year 1997 and 2000, when Oscar Ekponimo’s father had a partial stroke. Feeding became difficult in his home and young Ekponimo developed a desire to do something with his future, to empower people and solve the problem of hunger in the society. In less than three years and under Chowberry, his company’s pilot scheme, they have worked with ten retailers and three NGOs, fed over 150 orphans and vulnerable children. Plus, he never figured he would win a prestigious international prize like the Rolex Awards for Entreprise, or be the only African honoured in 2017 in Time magazine’s ‘The Next Generation Leaders’ among a group of ten across the world.

From the beginning, all Ekponimo and his team did was go to orphanages and distribute stuff, and then the breakthrough came-there was a friend of his who managed a super market and Ekponimo noticed how the staff threw away expired products that once sat on their shelves. “That was how the idea started evolving,” he says, dressed smartly in fitting shirt and trousers, in his office located in an impressive storied building in Gudu, Abuja. Before him is a laptop and desktop computer while he speaks with the air of someone who’s making progress conquering hunger with software called ‘Chowberry’. So Ekponimo ended up convincing his friend to have near-expired products given to him and his team, who then distributed to the needy.

After graduating from school (University of Calabar) where he studied Computer Science and armed with those skills, Ekponimo decided to work toward “automating everything”. What he was to do became clear during his quiet time with God. He realised that if a retailer could notify him and his team about the availability of products that were soon to expire, it will be faster and more efficient.

The fine-tuning stage was during Ekponimo’s research, where he worked at making a simple application to help retailers know when a product will expire. “But this wasn’t efficient because some of the retailers didn’t want to give it (products) up because there was no value for them,” he says. So he thought about what will be of value to them, enough to make them participate in the project and use the Chowberry software.

Again, another breakthrough came when Ekponimo walked into a well-known shopping store in Abuja and was trying to talk to them about the project. “They said they didn’t need it, they aren’t interested and don’t have a problem with expiration. So I walked a while on the aisle, and then I saw a canned tuna fish. It was 20th February 2014 and that particular tuna fish was expiring on the 7th of March. That was barely a week and a few days away,” he explains. So he pulled it out and said ‘I thought you said you don’t have this problem of expiration’? And they were surprised and asked him where he found it. That was how Ekponimo knew that the store didn’t have an automated or systematic way of knowing what categories of products were expiring. “And that’s the value we could provide for them. With our software, Chowberry, they could get automated reminders of when certain categories of products will expire.”

Ekponimo’s company has web-based interface with retailers who access the Chowberry software with a tablet once they (store) are signed up as product providers. In this way they are able to see that a particular product is expiring in twenty or forty days. While they are tracking that, Ekponimo’s team connects partner NGO’s that are feeding ‘hungry’ people, those who can’t, for instance, afford a tin of milk that’s N2, 000. “But because it’s going to expire in thirty days, they get to buy it for N500,” he says.

But funding was a huge problem and Ekponimo was stuck with work in 2016 when things changed for the better. “I was on the brink of throwing in the towel, because as with so many things in Nigeria, you don’t get support,” he says, adding that before that time, he wrote a list of places and people he had asked for support in vain, including organisations and government agencies. So he applied for a job as IT personnel in a big company. But at the point of being accepted, he backed off, driven by the passion of making food more affordable to low income earners and people who didn’t have so much money. Beyond that was the memory of hunger he himself experienced. It was at this point that the Rolex Award came through for Ekponimo. He became the only African in a group of five to win the Rolex Award for 2016.

 

A mentor of Ekponimo’s had encouraged him to apply for the Rolex Award (an international award that supports people carrying out extra-ordinary projects that impacts humanity) and he sent an entry. “In Geneva, Switzerland, contestants were presented to a jury that consisted of first Canadian astronaut, Chris Austin Hadfield, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Stephen Hel who interviewed me directly,” Ekponimo recalls, adding that out of 2, 300 applicants, he made the final list of five, winning in the Applied Technology category. 

 

“We had faced the jury and were asked to return to our different countries and the result will be announced. On my way, while I was still in Geneva, I got a call. First of all, I couldn’t pick where I was and the man now sent me an email: ‘Hello Oscar, can you pick up the phone? I have news’. When he said that I, among five people, have been selected for the prestigious award, I screamed so loud that the people around me wondered if I was all right and I now shared the news with some of them there,” Ekponimo narrates.

Armed with his prize, a grant in millions, Ekponimo works with a team of four. If it’s a Monday, they brainstorm on tasks for the week and what they needed to achieve. On a daily basis they are able to assign tasks, either programming new modules into the system, signing up new retailers or NGO’s working in the area of alleviating hunger. So, because Chowberry is creating value for retailers, they in turn subscribe to their software on a monthly basis. Their ultimate vision is to sustainably manage their products reaching expiration, become the number one source for available nutrition, and have Chowberry around the world as the number one solution that retailers use.