Musa Mishamo: The young Tanzanian engineer watching African farms from space

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.

He would eventually move to Dar es Salaam and study engineering, carrying dreams of becoming an aerospace engineer. After university, working around Tanzania’s sugarcane farms made him discover that farmers only discovered crop diseases after they had spread. Mishamo wondered whether satellites could help screen trouble beforehand.

Today, that question has become Rada 360. Yet Mishamo’s dreams have grown beyond monitoring crops. He wants to build a platform with agricultural data collected over the years that future innovators can use to train models and build technologies he cannot yet imagine.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You once dreamed of becoming an aerospace engineer. At what point did you realise the most interesting problems weren’t in space, but on the farms below?

I realised the problem wasn’t with the farmers themselves when I graduated. I joined one of the sugar cane companies in Tanzania and saw how they were struggling to monitor large farms. They also had nearby communities—we call them outgrowers—who were growing sugar cane and bringing it to the factory. They had issues monitoring their crops. They had big fields where they couldn’t do scouting, so a disease would erupt, and it would take time for them to realise there was a problem. I saw that satellite imagery could solve these challenges by looking at areas that even our eyes cannot see. Also, being able to do it remotely, without needing a physical scout to move through the field every day. You can suffer the image, but you can remotely access it when there are issues.

When you were a boy, what fascinated you more: taking things apart, asking impossible questions, or imagining places you’d never been?

Imagining places I had never been to. I was born in the village. There’s a place called Gaita, Tanzania. It’s on the legs of Lake Victoria, around Mwanza. It was the Mwanza region; now it’s the greater region. By that time, we were hearing a lot of stuff on the radio. I remember most of the news we were just hearing on the radio. There were no TVs in that area. One of the things I remember—when Nyerere died, I was sitting with my uncle at the farm, and at 1 p.m., he switched on Tanzania Broadcasting Station, TBC, and we heard the news. George W. Bush was in the news at that time, and also news about politics. So I was imagining: Oh, how is Dar es Salaam? How is Nairobi? I was imagining those places.

Most children look at the night sky and see stars. What did you see?

Mostly, I was imagining how big the world is. Looking at the stars usually brings another feeling. For us who believe in spiritual things, it gives us another perspective—imagining how big, how wonderful God is, and how wonderful creation is. Those kinds of things.

Satellite imagery sounds futuristic, yet your customers are farmers worrying about rain and harvests. How do you explain space technology to someone who’s never owned a computer?

That was one of the challenging things, because we are more into tech, and the message that needs to go to the farmer should be much simpler. I remember last year we met with our go-to-market strategy team to come up with ways that can be much simpler for farmers to understand. We came up with things like Jicho Shambani—”an eye in the farm”—where you can see something that you can’t see. So if you tell a farmer, “We are digital shamba,” it now relates to them. Some farmers say, “Oh, they have a camera out there”—they call it a camera.

Satellite images showing the crop health of a field. Image source: Rada360

What’s something you’ve learned from farmers that no university could ever have taught you?

From farmers, I’ve learned the traditional ways of studying the weather and the climate. They have only traditional ways—you are not taught this in the university. Some farmers watch ants moving to predict rain. If they see moving ants, they say, “Oh, it’s going to rain.” Some look at the stars. They study the sky, especially in the Mwanza area. They study the sky and understand: “Okay, it’s going to rain after two weeks.”

You and Erick Mwandu built Rada 360 together. When did you realise you’d found someone whose strengths complemented your own instead of competing with them?

I realised with Erick because we come from the same place. I’m older than him. But while studying agronomy, he became very passionate about technology. Of course, with my background in microengineering, I saw a big gap where I needed more strength: someone who could start on crop-related issues, since I had mostly focused on the engineering side. It’s agronomy—starting with crops, diseases, plant diseases, and weeds. I thought, okay, Erick—because it’s fashion, it’s technology, and he’s good at agronomy—can be a perfect fit for us to form this thing together.

Every entrepreneur has one decision that changed everything. What was yours?

One of the decisions was to build a digital platform. Formerly, we didn’t have this solution. When we started, we conducted soil testing, performed normal mapping, and performed manual analysis of the imagery. When we decided to adopt a digital platform, it felt like betting, but that one change changed everything.

You’ve spent years studying data from hundreds of kilometres above Earth. Has looking at the continent from that perspective changed how you think about Africa itself?

Yes, that changes things about Africa, because it is a large continent with extensive arable land. For example, in Eastern Africa and Zambia, 30% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s arable land is located. That area is huge. With satellite imaging, that is the only way you can unlock the potential of precision agriculture in that area—to see where the area’s agricultural potential is, where we can get water sources for irrigation. If we are looking to adopt irrigation and precision agriculture in that large context, we can’t eliminate satellite imagery.

How big is agriculture in Tanzania?

It’s widely known that because more than 80% of the population is involved in agriculture, almost 85–90% of the arable land in Africa can be cultivated. It’s not likely that we have a desert area now, and we also have a lot of water, water sources, rivers, and everything.

What’s the most uncomfortable truth you’ve discovered about climate change that policymakers still don’t seem to appreciate?

Policymakers still don’t appreciate much about environmental sustainability. The usual thing is: “These things are still available. We have the rivers; they will be there. They will never dry.” They see people cutting trees. They don’t. For example, deforestation—sometimes policymakers don’t take it seriously. They don’t take it seriously because you see a lot of areas now where deforestation is happening, and there are no strict controls.

People often describe founders as optimistic. Have you ever had a week when you secretly thought the company might not survive?

There are some times. When I think about the landscape of smallholder farmers in Tanzania, their ability to purchase technology is another challenge, as is the B2C model. When you push the B2C model, especially in Tanzania, sometimes you see the dark. But when you keep engaging with stakeholders, you see: oh, there is a way around it that you can figure out.

If I asked your closest friends what has changed most about you since founding Rada 360, what would they say?

Time—time with them. I’m spending less time with them. Since founding Rada 360, I have been employed, and most weekends I have been available to friends. But since founding Rada 360, sometimes you can skip weddings, you can skip birthdays. It happens. You can go much longer without seeing your parents.

You work in a field where science meets policy. Do politicians ask the right questions about agriculture, or are they solving yesterday’s problems?

I can say most politicians are solving yesterday’s problems. The reality is that politicians in Tanzania are making decisions based on elections: “Is this thing going to give me more votes?” They are doing things that can bring PR. If the thing doesn’t bring PR, it’s not that important. There are other things to do with precision agriculture, but if that thing cannot bring mass votes, then it’s not a priority. They won’t.

Suppose you had unlimited funding but could only solve one challenge in Africa. Would you still choose agriculture—or is there another problem you’d devote your life to?

I would still choose agriculture because it is broad. Especially for us, what we do is a combination of agricultural monitoring and agriforestry, so it’s part of forest monitoring. All that is part of environmental monitoring. So I still choose agriculture.

Rada 360 data specialist collecting data in a bean field. Image source: Rada360

What’s the best failure you’ve ever had?

The biggest failure in business, for example, is having a challenge with a scalable model. Previously, I told you we were doing soil testing, so we didn’t have time to figure out a scalable model for it. It was so manual. You had to deploy deep in the field, and the scalability was a bit challenging. That’s when we also pivoted a bit to a digital platform. Some things are coming.

What are some of the challenges you met when you were doing soil testing?

Some of the challenges are that Tanzania is big. You can receive a call from Kigoma, almost 1,500 kilometres away, and the farmer wants testing of five acres. You see now—that cost doesn’t balance. A lot of them cannot pay exactly your ticket. It doesn’t make sense if you are travelling, say, to 100 acres or 700. Even five—even 500 is fine. Even 100 at 50. Then it makes a lot of sense.

Complete this sentence: “People think Africa lacks resources. I think what we really lack is…”

I think what we really lack is technology. We have more resources, but to extract them, you need technology. Resources, agriculture resources—one of the things. We have big grants, but we don’t do agricultural testing. We don’t do machine automation. We don’t have tools for monitoring. You find, for example, in the global North—Europe and America—that they have only small blocks, but they produce a lot —almost 10–20 times more than we do. The only thing we lack is technology to ramp up the yields.

Imagine it’s 2050 and a young Tanzanian engineer tells you, “I started my company because of something you built.” What do you hope the company is solving?

The company will be solving the challenges of agricultural data. Currently, in what we are building, we are collecting a lot of data on soil, crop type, and weather, which can be used for future predictions. In the future, young people may also build agricultural data companies, training their models on the data we collected over the years. Even AI—you can’t do AI without data. So the foundation we are building can provide future innovators with the foundation to use and build other things.

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