Tamarah Moutotekema Boussamba, making the agriculture digital

Today the world celebrates the International Day of the Girl. This represents an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to this worldwide bidding: young girls must do their part within the digital generation and contribute to shape and ensure our shared future. Girls have the same capacities as boys and have an enormous potential in the digital sector. When they have access to the means to act, everybody benefits.

 This is how Tamarah Moutotekema Boussamba was able to stand out. She made her way in the digital sector as a 27 years-old entrepreneur from Gabon. She is at the head of the startup WAGUI, a mobile app offering advice, a follow-up, and a better marketing of locally made agriculture products.

Thanks to this start up, Tamarah was soon internationally known, and is among the 50 African digital champions in 2021 according to Digital Foundation Africa’s list with an ambitious vision. She merely participates to the local production growth of agricultural products by offering advice on a digital platform.

At the beginning, Tamarah only had the idea to help her grandmother to better cultivate and market agricultural products. She explains: “To me, the main challenge is to stay focused on what I choose to do. I have to excel, work and prove that I am capable of running my project efficiently. For that, the support of my family is more than necessary, as it helps me having a better self-confidence to better overcome the issues that I may encounter. With WAGUI, my objective is to increase the farmers’ income by better solving linking issues between them and produce. Another objective it to facilitate the access to advice about agriculture, and WAGUI   can be improved depending on the feedback we receive. Integrating everyone in the value chain is also a challenge.”

Along with WAGUI, Tamarah continues to handle the collection of agricultural products such as cassava, which she cultivates on a field of 25 acres at Ndendé in the south of Gabon.

Tamarah holds a PhD in business intelligence and will use it mostly in agriculture. She adds that “My objective would be to be able to open one store every year until 2023. I would also like to offer a wider range of local products and promote them. I am going to continue investing in cassava and committing myself a little more to this branch.”

Girls of today belong to a digital generation. To Tamarah, she invests it in agriculture. Girls need to be supported in their whole diversity to give them the power to act and to find solutions for them to become drive of digital change.

The path to digital equality for girls is long and difficult. The wide gap in the internet use between geographical regions and generations worldwide has gone from 11% in 2013 to 17% six years later. In more than two third of countries, girls only represent 15% of graduates in sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

A video documentary resuming her path by Canal Plus here: https://youtu.be/zZ4OcugW95c