Reggie Joseph Okoko

The Silent Cost of Export Rejections. For the founder of JANI AI, the obsession started with the sight of shipments being confiscated and exports being rejected. Not because the food was bad, but because the data was missing. "I saw shipments intercepted because of a lack of proof regarding origin or compliance," he recalls. "I kept hearing the same story: 'We cannot prove where this came from.' Supply chains were running on paper or Excel, and when one missing record threatens an entire shipment, that pressure flows all the way back to the farmer. I realized then that if Africa is to be the world's food basket, we have to modernize how food is recorded, verified, and traded. Traceability is the foundation of trust."

The Myth of the "Offline Farmer." The industry often dismisses AgTech because of the stereotype that farmers don't use software or smartphones. JANI AI is built on the belief that this is a design failure, not a user failure. "The idea that AgTech won't work in rural areas is false," the founder asserts. "With offline-first design, local language support, and a mix of field agents and SMS/USSD, we can capture data anywhere. I took the risk of deploying an MVP early with tea and coffee cooperatives to prove it. We onboarded farmers and traced produce in real-time, validating that the demand for better markets is stronger than the barrier to technology."

The Forge: Compliance Alone Is Not Enough. The residency at The Forge brought a brutal realization: compliance alone is not enough to make a farmer use an app every day. "Features do not equal value," he notes. "Farmers don't need a complex dashboard; they need simple, fast tools that make their lives easier. This realization pushed us to pivot our design—keeping the compliance data capture lightweight while focusing the 'Farm App' on daily utility. We stopped building for the regulator and started building for the person with the soil on their hands."

The Forest and the Market. The stakes are global and environmental. Africa loses 1.2 million hectares of forest a year to agricultural expansion. As global markets tighten rules on deforestation, smallholders face a binary choice: provide proof or be excluded. "To an engineer, we are turning messy, noisy farm-to-fork data into a trusted system of record. To a stranger, it's about survival. If we can't prove where the food comes from, forests pay the price and honest farmers lose their livelihoods." The mission is clear: deploy JANI AI as a traceability solution for 1 million farmers, transforming African food systems from a "black box" into the world's most transparent supply chain.