Musa Mishamo speaks so softly that you find yourself leaning across the table to catch the end of his sentences. He smiles often, answers questions briefly, and does not embellish. This is slightly inconvenient when you are interviewing a man whose ambitions stretch hundreds of kilometres above the earth.
We meet on July 30 at the Somerset Westview Hotel in Nairobi’s Kilimani neighbourhood. Mishamo is the co-founder of Rada 360, a Tanzanian agritech company using satellite imagery and agricultural data to help farmers understand what is happening on their land.
Mishamo was born near the shores of Lake Victoria, around Mwanza, in a village where they connected with the outside world through radio. He remembers sitting with his uncle on the farm when news came over Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation (TBC) that Julius Nyerere, the first president, had died. Dar es Salaam and Nairobi were distant places he could only imagine.
“I was imagining: Oh, how is Dar es Salaam? How is Nairobi?” he recalls.
Originally published by TechCabal.