Blog How PABRA helped Imara Tech turn innovation into jobs and hope for thousands
Since 2018, PABRA has been partnering with local innovators in Tanzania to address post-harvest challenges. Imara Tech transformed Multi-Crop Threshers into affordable machines, empowering women, creating jobs, and improving farmer livelihoods.
The harvest had always been the hardest part. For countless farming families across Tanzania, bringing crops from the field was only half the battle. The real struggle began after harvest, when women spent hours, sometimes days, threshing beans by hand. The work was physically exhausting, often leaving them with chronic back pain, while poor post-harvest handling led to significant grain losses and reduced incomes. For many young people, agriculture offered little promise beyond hard labour.
Today, that picture is fast changing, thanks to a youth-led enterprise whose journey began with a simple idea and the support of the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) Program of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.
From selling just six machines, Imara Technology Ltd has grown into one of East Africa's leading manufacturers of Multi-Crop Threshers, with more than 1,000 machines now working across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Behind that remarkable growth lies a story of research, innovation, entrepreneurship and partnerships working together to improve lives.
The earlier big machine before the prototyping.
Multi-Crop Threshers are reducing women’s workload during post-harvest handling.
The journey traces back to 2018, when PABRA set out to solve one of the most persistent yet overlooked challenges in bean production: post-harvest drudgery. Threshing alone accounted for nearly 20 percent of bean production and post-harvest costs, and the work was almost exclusively carried out by women. Determined to find a practical solution, PABRA partnered with the Feed the Future Soybean Innovation Lab, the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI), and other collaborators to train local artisans in manufacturing Multi-Crop Threshers.
Among the 20 young Tanzanians selected for the program was Alfred Chingula. While many saw the training as an opportunity to learn a new skill, Chingula saw something bigger. He used it as a chance to build a business that could solve real problems for farmers.
The early threshers worked well but were bulky, expensive and designed to be pulled by tractors, making them inaccessible for many smallholder farmers. Chingula and his team believed they could do better.
The team
Jean Claude Rubyogo
Leader, Global Bean Program, and Director, Pan Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA)
Justus Ochieng
Research Team Leader
Sylvia Monica Kalemera
Bean Program & PABRA Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Coordinator, Country Representative for TanzaniaKeep exploring
