Aquamet

Environmental and social impact for fish farmers in Ghana

Originally the founders, coming from diverse backgrounds, Frank Owusu (Aquaculture), Priscilla Brempong (Economics) and Gabriel Lorlornyo (Science) met at an accelerator program. During one of their market research, they met fish farmer Tetteh, who happened to have lost almost two-thirds of his adult fishes in a single day close to harvesting time due to an unnoticed ammonia toxicity. This pivotal encounter led the team to interview more farmers on this problem. They found out, that fish farmers loose over 45% of their stock to poor water quality monitoring and management leading to low yields and food insecurity. As a result, the team looked more closely at the tools currently available to address the challenge of high mortality in fish farming. In 2022, “Aquamet” was founded to provide an efficient and low-cost solution for smallholder fish farmers to optimize their yield and revenue.

The relevance of this issue is clear when we look at the importance of fish as a food source in Ghana: According to Frank, 7 out of 10 Ghanaians and most Africans rely on fish as their primary protein source. Unfortunately, 65 % of the fish is imported into the country annually, which weakens the food system and contributes highly to malnutrition as affordability and accessibility to fish are both low. Although the aquaculture sector had the potential to offset the fish deficit gap, high loses during production represent a great challenge making the sector unsustainable.

Aquamet´s approach to improving fish farmers yield using their technology seeks directly to improve the country´s food security and reduces carbon footprints of fish losses during production.

The name of the start-up was chosen by Priscilla and is a combination of Aqua (Water) and the acronym Met (Efficient Monitoring Technology).

Making fish farmer´s lives easier

Aquamet´s solution is a solar powered smart probe that measures critical water quality parameters, interprets the data over an IoT platform, and matches the data if there's a threshold abnormality and sends recommendations to the farmer via SMS to take management action. The water quality - which is the biggest indicator of pond and fish health - can be monitored directly on a mobile app through bluetooth or wifi connections or online.

This combination of 24/7 monitoring in real time and an app that contains farming tools such as a feeding estimator, record keeping and real-time advisory with experts is the first of its kind in Ghana.

“That is the nature of our product: it makes water quality monitoring very efficient and it also contains additional features that help the ordinary farmer in daily activities on the mobile app.”

The app can be obtained by a one-time purchase and extended services are provided as a subscription service. The solution costs 70% less than competitive products and proves to currently be the most affordable on the market. Furthermore, to increase the accessibility of the product, farmers can choose between a monetary payment or a payment in an equivalent of fish.For that the start-up partners with “Maku foods” which is a youth led start-up company focusing on marketing and processing of fish, to sell the fish that was collected as payment.These factors not only create a positive impact for the farmers, but also contribute to stabilizing the food security and availability. The social impact also lies in their customer service: constant communication and local visits to the farms are important to the start-up. Moreover, Aquamet offers trainings to farmers and the youth as potential farmers on the topic of bio security measures and good practices.

„We demonstrate to our farmers how overcoming this challenge has a ripple effect on ensuring zero hunger, improving social economic growth, contributing to responsible production and consumption and reducing carbon footprints from fish loss.“

Next steps at Aquamet

Currently the start-up is focusing on improving their capital expenditure to increase production rates to meet the demands. This also includes sourcing raw materials in significant quantities for a substantial number of farmers, procurement of key equipment and staffing in the area of product manufacturing. The long-term goal is to reach at least 70% of Ghanaian farmers with the solution and to expand into new markets (Nigeria, Gambia, Cameroon and Kenya) by the end of 2024 and scale.

With their innovative approach, Aquamet who joined the ISC3 Global Start-up Service in July 2023, is actively contributing to SDG 2 (zero hunger), SDS 8 (decent work and economic growth), SDG 12 (responsible production and consumption) and SDG 13 (climate action).

Aquamet