Peepal was a service-design and strategy challenge: defining what to build, for whom, and why — before a single wireframe existed. A digital platform connecting Kenya's smallholder farmers to markets, education, and sustainable practices, designed against the most unforgiving constraint in product work: the last mile.
Kenya's agriculture sector accounts for 33% of GDP and over 60% of exports. The people who power it — approximately 9 million farmers, of whom only 3.4 million are formally employed — operate with almost no digital infrastructure, minimal access to credit, and farming practices that are actively degrading the land they depend on.
The numbers tell a story of systemic neglect. Less than 7% of arable land is irrigated. Farmers spend 1.5 to 2.5 times more labor hours than peers elsewhere in Africa, with women performing the majority of the work. Less than 4.1% of the national budget goes to agriculture despite it contributing a third of GDP. Agricultural lending is smaller than any other sector.
Meanwhile, 40% of Kenya's population lives in poverty, 25% suffer chronic food insecurity, and 30% of households regularly lack enough money for food. The African food market is projected to reach $1 trillion — but without intervention, the people who grow the food won't participate in that growth.
The World Bank, through EY's Sustainability Practice, needed a strategic design framework and digital platform concept that could address this gap: connecting smallholder farmers to sustainable practices, market access, and financial inclusion — from farm to fork.
This case study is fundamentally different from GenIAus and Genie. Those were enterprise product design problems — redesigning interfaces for professional users within an existing platform. Peepal was a service design and strategy challenge — defining what to build, for whom, and why, before a single wireframe existed.
It required me to operate as a consultant first and a designer second: conducting secondary research across a domain I had no prior expertise in, facilitating stakeholder workshops to align competing priorities, mapping complex socio-economic systems, and translating strategic direction into a platform concept that could serve users with vastly different levels of digital literacy, economic power, and trust in technology.
I started by mapping the agricultural ecosystem through a socio-ecological framework — understanding the nested layers of influence that shape a Kenyan farmer's reality.
This wasn't an academic exercise. Each layer revealed a design constraint: you can't build a digital platform for farmers who don't trust technology (micro), don't have access to credit (meso), operate under archaic land policies (exo), and are watching their arable land shrink due to climate change (macro).
Through secondary research and stakeholder workshops, I identified four interconnected problem areas that any solution would need to address simultaneously — and a clear scope: smallholder farmers in Kenya on one side, agribusinesses, crop aggregators, and buyers on the other.
Beyond the problem areas, I mapped five macro-level challenges that constrained what any digital intervention could realistically achieve. These weren't just research findings; they were design constraints that determined what the platform could and couldn't attempt to solve.
From the research synthesis, I developed three primary personas representing the key stakeholders in the agricultural value chain. Each had fundamentally different digital literacy levels, device access, and trust thresholds — which meant the platform couldn't be one-size-fits-all.
I mapped Wanjiku's complete seasonal journey — from planning what to plant through selling the harvest — to identify where Peepal could create the most value at each stage.
The journey revealed a consistent pattern: at every stage, Wanjiku was making critical decisions with insufficient information and no bargaining power. She plants based on last year's experience, not market demand data. She buys seeds from the nearest agro-dealer without comparing prices. She manages pests based on guesswork because the extension officer hasn't visited. She loses 20–30% of her harvest to poor storage. And she sells at the farm gate to the first buyer who shows up, accepting whatever price is offered.
The emotional arc was uniformly negative — uncertain at planning, anxious at sourcing, stressed during growing, defeated at harvest, and powerless at selling. This wasn't a journey with peaks and valleys; it was a steady decline. Peepal's interventions needed to create upward inflection points at every stage.
Before designing anything, I established the strategic framework that would guide every product decision. The platform needed to satisfy three simultaneous value propositions — value creation, sustainability, and farmer-centricity.
I mapped how product and service innovation in agritech connects to the broader sustainability journey — a four-phase cycle that informed Peepal's phased roadmap.
Phase 1 of the platform would focus on education and market connection (Reframe + Accelerate), Phase 2 on financing and compliance tools (Govern), and Phase 3 on reporting and ecosystem intelligence (Trust). The cycle isn't linear — each phase informs the next, and trust loops back to strategy.
The platform needed to serve two strategic timeframes simultaneously — innovating new sustainable products and business models for future growth, while integrating sustainability metrics into existing agricultural practices today.
I designed a three-phase research and development approach tailored to the agritech context — from ethnographic field research to data analysis to prototype and launch.
For the discovery phase, I used a structured human-centric methodology — extract and summarise data, find patterns across participants, create insights and service blueprints, and organise insights into a digestible CX framework for stakeholder alignment.
From the research, I developed five guiding hypotheses about the future of the agri-business sector. These weren't just strategic input — they became the functional requirements for the platform's architecture.
I mapped the platform's goals against Kenya's national Agriculture Transformation & Growth Strategy. This alignment ensured the platform could plug into existing government infrastructure and made the investment case stronger for World Bank stakeholders.
From the research, strategy, and hypothesis work, I defined Peepal's core value proposition through three pillars and an Input → Throughput → Output system architecture.
Enable the transition to sustainable agriculture through education. A repository of sustainable practices including videos and blogs, combined with forecasting tools for demand and food production.
Instil confidence in farmers with support and access to demand. A marketplace connecting farmers to companies and buyers, with transparent pricing and reliable business connections.
Monitor and decentralise food production to address global food shortage. A phone app, in-person workshops, and community kiosks accessible to all farmers regardless of digital literacy.
Every design decision was measured against the triple bottom line framework — not as a strategic statement, but as a literal evaluation rubric applied to every feature decision.
I advocated for a specific approach to MVP development in the agritech context — one that prioritised user value over feature count.
Most agritech platforms launch as functional tools and never progress beyond that. Peepal needed to launch as usable, if not delightful, experience — because the target users (smallholder farmers) would abandon anything that felt extractive or confusing. Maintaining competitiveness means increasing user value, not feature count.
I followed a four-phase experience design approach. Each phase produced an artifact stakeholders could review, debate, and sign off — the alignment mechanism that kept World Bank, EY, and local partners moving in sync.
With the strategic framework, research insights, and system architecture defined, I moved into high-fidelity concept design for the Peepal mobile app — the primary throughput channel for reaching smallholder farmers. Every screen was designed against two filters: the triple bottom line, and the three user personas.
The home screen needed to answer the farmer's most urgent questions within seconds: What's the weather doing? How are my crops? What are today's prices?
I designed it around four information layers, prioritised by immediacy. At the top, weather and season context — because farming decisions are weather decisions. Below, crop health cards showing each planted crop's stage and progress, with status badges that surface actionable alerts without requiring the farmer to interpret data. The market prices section shows real-time local prices in Kenyan shillings with weekly trend indicators. At the bottom, contextual recommendations — the app proactively suggests relevant learning content based on the farmer's current crop stage.
The design deliberately avoids complexity. No charts, no dashboards, no data visualizations. The target user may have limited digital literacy — every piece of information is presented as plain language with clear visual hierarchy.
The marketplace screen directly addresses the core problem of farmer powerlessness in price negotiation. Instead of the traditional model — a middleman arrives at the farm gate and names a price — Peepal inverts the dynamic: buyers post requests with transparent pricing, and farmers choose which offers to accept.
Each listing shows crop and grade required, offering price per bag, quantity needed, pickup distance, and payment method. Verified buyer badges address the trust deficit identified in our research. Tags like "Collection provided" vs. "Farmer delivers" surface logistics implications upfront, preventing surprises that erode trust.
The "Accept offer" interaction is deliberately simple — one tap, not a negotiation flow. For Phase 1, reducing friction matters more than maximising price optimisation.
The learning screen embodies the "Educate" pillar. Rather than a generic content library, it's contextually intelligent — the top recommendation is personalised to the farmer's current crop stage and active alerts.
When Wanjiku's beans are in pod-fill stage and showing signs of pest stress, the first thing she sees is a 4-minute video on aphid prevention in Swahili. This isn't a content recommendation algorithm — it's a direct mapping between crop data and relevant educational content.
The kiosk finder at the bottom is a critical inclusion. Not every farmer has a smartphone or reliable data connection. Community kiosks — physical access points with offline content — ensure that the platform's educational value reaches farmers regardless of their digital access level. This design decision came directly from the socio-ecological mapping: the micro-system determines access as much as the individual's technology ownership.
Beyond the deliverables: this project demonstrated that design strategy and consulting methodology can tackle problems far larger than interface design. The framework I built for Peepal — socio-ecological mapping, value-driven prioritisation, triple bottom line evaluation — became a reusable approach I've carried into every strategic project since.
Design for the last mile, not the first screen. The most impactful decisions in this project weren't about wireframes — they were about delivery channels. Adding kiosks alongside the app wasn't a UX decision; it was an access decision that determined whether the platform would reach farmers with no smartphones.
Strategy without systems thinking is just opinions. The socio-ecological framework wasn't decorative — it revealed constraints (archaic land policies, shifting cultivation, gendered labor distribution) that would have blindsided us if we'd jumped straight to feature definition.
Consulting-grade alignment is a design skill. Unifying World Bank priorities, EY's sustainability practice goals, and local partner capabilities required the same kind of synthesis that design demands — holding competing constraints and finding the solution that respects all of them.
More direct farmer engagement. The secondary research was thorough, but I would have pushed harder for primary ethnographic fieldwork — even remote interviews with farmers through local partners. The socio-ecological mapping would have been sharper with first-person data.
Prototype the kiosk experience. The app design got the most attention, but the kiosk channel was arguably more important for reaching the most underserved farmers. A dedicated kiosk prototype would have strengthened the concept and given local partners something concrete to validate against.
I'm open to senior product design roles, advisory work, and selective collaborations. Whether you have a defined brief or a fuzzy problem space, let's talk it through.
damleaalvee@gmail.com