Daniel Oulaï: an "agripreneur" at the service of peasants

Audio 4:10

By: David Baché

Daniel Oulaï, social entrepreneur in the agricultural sector, is the founder of Grainothèque. Thirty-year-old and already multi-skilled, he wants to support the activity of farmers to enhance their work and allow them to live with dignity from their activity.

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His job, his vocation, is to support the activity of the peasants. A mission he assigned himself from childhood. Daniel Oulaï was born in Liberia, his mother's country, but quickly, war broke out, and forced his family to cross the border. Daniel Oulaï grew up in Ivory Coast, the country of his father, a pastor who crisscrossed the west of the country, taking with him all his family. These first years aroused in Daniel Oulaï an awareness, which then germinated: " I was born during the war, in Liberia, in a region where food kills many more people than bullets from Kalashnikovs, says a soft voice the young entrepreneur. It was in Liberia that I first felt the problems related to food, and this was confirmed during the first fifteen years of my childhood. In Côte d'Ivoire, I was especially marked by post-harvest losses. All my childhood, I saw vast fields, filled granaries, but behind, it was misery. "

First project: seed banks

Daniel Oulaï therefore decides that he will help the peasants of his childhood: not to lose their stocks, to access markets to sell their production ... In short, he wants to help them to live with dignity from their work. This is how he becomes an "agripreneur", a barbarism created in the United States in the late 90s, which mixes the words " agriculture " and " entrepreneur ", and in which Daniel Oulaï, who studied in marketing before being trained in agro-ecology, fully recognizes itself.

" I don't know where I heard it for the first time," laughs Daniel Oulaï with the frowns of the one who searches without finding, but this word ended up being the one that defined me best: an agricultural entrepreneur who wants to change the way it looks and practices in this sector . "And to evoke the beginning of its activities:" The first project was to open seed banks across the fields; spaces where farmers can come and share seeds. The innovation that we brought is that we started to document these seeds and to popularize good practices to settle the question of productivity, on which the industrialists are based to sell their seeds on the markets . "

Multi-award

We are in 2016. Daniel Oulaï is barely 25 years old, and he has just created the Grainothèque. A structure for which he quickly received a series of prizes, awarded by magazines, international public bodies, but also foundations and very large companies ... which brought in new funding. A reassuring recognition, but also a real questioning for this militant entrepreneur. " I asked myself whether I should accept or refuse," he recalls, " so I discussed this at length with my teams. We said to ourselves that as long as we were not asked to change our way of seeing things, that we were forced to do nothing, that we did not create accountability and that the framework remained healthy, we had to go ". With hindsight, Daniel Oulaï has no regrets: “ It opened a lot of doors for us and it brought us visibility. After one prize, two prizes ... by credible foundations, it makes it possible to reach very good partners who help the company to move forward. "

Agricultural fablab

Consequently, Daniel Oulaï's Grainotheque is growing. It is expanding its activities to new areas in Côte d'Ivoire; it is also launching a local pork production label. We can also talk about this support program for 1000 young farmers, which will start in June, or the audacious agricultural Fablab project, the first in West Africa, in Abidjan: " It will be a space where will allow researchers, agronomists and farmers to meet, to be able to break down barriers between scientific research and find simple, accessible solutions that meet the needs of farmers. The space is not yet open, but work has started. Daniel Oulaï describes the first prototype resulting from this collaboration with enthusiasm: “ we have developed a connected solar incubator, which allows any farmer in rural areas, who does not have access to electricity, to reduce their rate of losses in terms of egg hatching. It's done with recycling, and it's free technology that any farmer can duplicate. "

Daniel Oulaï is from yesterday and until tomorrow in Man, in the center-west of the Ivory Coast, where he co-organizes the Forum of agricultural entrepreneurship (from February 20 to 22). The one who says he read a lot of biographies has already been approached by political figures, who asked him to join him. For the moment, that doesn't mean anything to him ... but Daniel Oulaï has already proven that, at home, ideas were also sometimes seeds.

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