Daniel Wanjama

Daniel Wanjama grew up in rural Kenya with his family practicing subsistence farming. First-hand experience with hunger motivated him to work in the civil service as an agricultural officer. However, he soon realized that the approaches and policies informed by the green revolution for the industrialization of agriculture were not working for small-scale farmers. He noted that the increased use of hybrid seeds, fertilizers and pesticides was neither improving farmers’ income nor enabling small-scale farmers to feed themselves with safe and sufficient food. In 2009, he founded Seed Savers Network to address food and nutritional insecurity, with seeds as an entry point. It cannot be acceptable that small-scale farmers are the hungriest and the poorest segment of the Kenyan population. The network has now grown to the extent that farmers are conducting campaigns and reaching out to other smallholder farmers across the country.