It is pretty clear by now that we are working towards a big, bold vision with MOTHERLAND. But having a big, bold vision is the easy part. Building it requires knowledge, grit, skills and much more. Most of all, it requires amazing collaborators who together build towards the shared vision bit by bit. Block by block, in concrete and pragmatic ways.

During the initial phase of MOTHERLAND, we established both the foundation for amazing collaborations and an understanding of the first principles that serve as the building blocks. This happened through a series of conversations and conferences in the first quarter of 2020 with more than fifty farmers, changemakers, entrepreneurs and other humans from across the African continent.

Our African partners were successful in this quest and identified the "Post Harvest Value Chain" as this driver. If we rethink and rebuild the path from farm to fork on a local level, this will positively ripple effects upstream and downstream.

As we were searching for, finding and qualifying hundreds of African startups in this field for our database, several things became apparent:

• Africa has all the knowledge, engineering prowess and technical precision she needs. There is no need to import any of this.

• There is an abundance of amazing solutions all across the continent

• BUT these solutions work in a vacuum. They are scattered across the continent, often without connection to any supporting environment, forcing them to focus on building many of their support functions themselves, distracting them from their focus, setting them up for failure.

As we are now approaching Phase 3 of MOTHERLAND, we are working towards providing a way for those startups to focus on what they are good at while solving their market access and scaling problems. And on top of that, supporting a local community on their path towards self-sufficiency and self-reliance.

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