Peepal — a World Bank agritech platform connecting Kenya's smallholder farmers to markets, education, and sustainable practices.
9 million Kenyan farmers power a third of GDP but get less than 4% of lending — and a $1 trillion food market is closing fast without them.
A service design and strategy engagement — mapping the system, aligning three stakeholder groups, and defining a platform concept before a single wireframe existed.
Kenya's agriculture sector powers a third of the country's GDP and most of its exports — yet the people behind it operate with almost no digital infrastructure, minimal credit access, and land-degrading practices they can't afford to change.
A $1 trillion market is closing fast — without the people who grow the 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 redesigned interfaces for existing platforms. Peepal was a service design and strategy challenge: defining what to build, for whom, and why, before a single wireframe existed.
Six nested layers, each one a real constraint on what could be built.
It required me to operate as a consultant first and a designer second — secondary research in a domain I had no prior expertise in, stakeholder workshops to align competing priorities, and mapping the socio-economic systems that would shape everything downstream.
I mapped that system through a socio-ecological framework — six nested layers of influence, each revealing its own design constraint: farmers who don't trust technology (micro), lack access to credit (meso), operate under archaic land policies (exo), and are watching their arable land shrink under climate change (macro).
From the research synthesis, I developed three primary personas representing the key stakeholders in the agricultural value chain — each with fundamentally different digital literacy, device access, and trust thresholds, which meant the platform couldn't be one-size-fits-all.
Producer, buyer, enabler — and one steady decline until Peepal interrupts it.
I then 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. At every stage, she was making critical decisions with insufficient information and no bargaining power:
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.
Beyond the problem statement, I built a stack of strategic frameworks — problem areas, macro constraints, decision filters, innovation cycles, research hypotheses, and policy alignment — that together determined what the platform could and couldn't attempt to solve.
Eight frameworks, one job: filter out everything the platform shouldn't attempt.
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, five macro-level challenges constrained what any digital intervention could realistically achieve — not just research findings, but design constraints that determined what the platform could and couldn't attempt to solve.
Every product decision then had to satisfy three simultaneous priorities at once — value creation, sustainability, and farmer-centricity. If a feature didn't serve all three, it didn't ship.
Zooming out, product and service innovation in agritech connects to a broader four-phase sustainability cycle — strategy, action, governance, and trust, each phase informing the next.
The platform also had to serve two strategic timeframes at once: disrupting long-term with new sustainable products and business models, while defending short-term by optimizing today's practices.
From the research, five guiding hypotheses about the sector's future became functional requirements for the platform's architecture — from nutrition transformation to transparent supply chains.
Finally, I mapped the platform's goals against Kenya's national Agriculture Transformation & Growth Strategy, to ensure it could plug into existing government infrastructure and strengthen the investment case for World Bank stakeholders.
Every one of these lenses fed into a single evaluation rubric — the triple bottom line — applied as a literal test to every feature decision, not a strategic slogan.
From the research, strategy, and hypothesis work, I defined Peepal's core value proposition through three pillars and an Input → Throughput → Output system architecture.
Three pillars, one system — this is what all that research became.
Sustainable-practice videos and blogs, plus demand and production forecasting.
A marketplace connecting farmers to buyers, with transparent pricing.
A phone app, in-person workshops, and community kiosks — accessible to all.
I paired a three-phase research approach with a human-centric discovery method and a four-phase design process — from ethnographic field research through synthesis to sign-off-ready artifacts at every stage.
Every phase ended in an artifact stakeholders could sign off on.
The research and development approach moved from ethnographic field research, to data analysis and solution proposals, to prototyping and launch — each phase using methodologies calibrated to the agritech context.
Within the discovery phase, a structured human-centric method turned raw field data into a CX framework: extract and summarise data, find patterns across participants, create insights, then organise into a unified framework.
That fed into a four-phase experience design process — Discover, Define, Design, Develop — where each phase produced an artifact stakeholders could review, debate, and sign off, keeping World Bank, EY, and local partners in sync.
I advocated for a specific approach to MVP development in the agritech context — one that prioritised user value over feature count.
Launch usable, not just functional — trust is too thin to spend twice.
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.
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.
No charts, no jargon — every screen readable at a glance, offline-first.
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?
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 ensure the platform's value reaches farmers regardless of digital access — a decision straight from the socio-ecological mapping: access is determined by the micro-system, not just device ownership.
Six deliverables, one shared vision, zero wireframes wasted on the wrong problem.
Beyond the deliverables: this proved design strategy can tackle problems far larger than interface design. The framework — 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 — that's the whole lesson.
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.
Nine million farmers. A $1 trillion market closing fast. The framework built for Peepal was the on-ramp designed to make sure they weren't locked out of it.
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