Claire Reid

Claire is an innovative thinker and an entrepreneur at heart. She has an ability to look at processes and products and see a simpler, better method of getting the job done. This was the case when Claire encountered the process of vegetable gardening at the age of 16 and subsequently she invented and patented a new process for planting seed known today as Reel Gardening. Claire obtained her Masters in Architecture from the University of Pretoria in 2010 and she attributes her business management style to the creative thinking skills she learnt while becoming an Architect. Claire founded Reel Gardening (PTY) ltd in 2009 with her partner Sean Blanckenberg. The company has sustainably grown since. Reel Gardening currently employs 10 people, servicing the development sector through its school growing program, the corporate sector through its custom branded marketing offerings and the Retail sector through its local and international retail sales. Claire is an Ambassador for the Richard Branson Centre for Entrepreneurship as well as a regular speaker on social entrepreneurship at both the Wits Business School and the Gordon Institute of Business Science. CLAIRE’S ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE :• AUGUST 2002 - Gold Medal at Eskom Expo for Young Scientists National Finals.• AUGUST 2003 - South African Junior Water Prize Winner, Awarded by Minister Ronnie Kastrils in Johannesburg, RSA.• AUGUST 2003 - International Stockholm junior Water Prize Winner, Awarded by Princess Victoria in Stockholm,Sweden.• OCTOBER 2003 - Speaker at International World Environment and Technology Conference in Los Angeles, USA.• APRIL 2004 - Winner of Woman in water for Scientific Research Below the Age of 35, Awarded by Thabo Mbeki at the presidential guest house in Pretoria, RSA.• MAY 2004 - Finalist in Shoprite Checkers Woman of the Year in Science and Technology, Awarded at the ICC in CT.• AUGUST 2008 - Guest Speaker at the World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden.• JUNE 2010 - Finalist in CEO Magazine, Most influential women in Business and government award in the Agricultural Sector.• AUG 2010 - Speaker at the inaugural Women’s Legacy Dialogue Event held at the Sandton Convention Centre.• NOVEMBER 2010 - International United Nations Environmental Program Seed Awards Winner.• MAY 2011 - Feather Awards Business Icon and Entrepreneur Certificate of Achievement.• OCTOBER 2011 - Winner of the SAB Foundation Social Innovation Awards.• NOVEMBER 2011 - Bronze Award in the International Green Awards for the Best Green Entrepreneur.• MARCH 2012 - Department of Water Affairs Sector Awards recognition awardee for water conservation and water demand management.• MARCH 2013 - EMEA winner of Global Social Venture Competition : London Business School.• MARCH 2013 - Regional Winner of HULT prize : Hult Business School London.• AUGUST 2013 - Speaker at the G(irls)20 Summit, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia.• SEPTEMBER 2014 - Securing Water for Food Awardee : World Water Week Stockholm.• MARCH 2015 - Speaker at the United Nations Environmental Programme African Ministerial Conference on Inclusive green economies for poverty reduction and sustainable development in Africa. Cairo, Egypt.• JUNE 2015 - Speaker alongside Richard Branson at The Next Decade Event. London, UK.• NOV 2015 - Selected as one of the BBC top 100 women of 2015.

Starting a Social Enterprise: How Technical Assistance Helped Me Reach My Goals

South Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
1. Jun 2017

When I was 16 years old, I saw how difficult gardening could be in South Africa and set out to change it. I wanted to give people, regardless of their experience or education level, joy in growing their own food and protect the quarter of South Africans who go hungry every day. So I developed a paper seed strip technology that allows aspiring gardeners to plant seeds at the correct spacing and depth to reduce water usage and increase germination rates.

The product has been wildly successful, but it has not been easy moving a new agriculture technology from idea to proof of concept to scale in an emerging market that ag-tech investors have found too risky.

 

Founder Claire Reed shows off some of the Reel Gardening product line. Photo courtesy of Reel Gardening.
Founder Claire Reid shows off some of the Reel Gardening product line. Photo courtesy of Reel Gardening.

As the Reel Gardening concept began to gain traction, I needed a small business loan to purchase equipment, hire more staff and grow the company. However, it required onerous interest that nearly crippled the business and, more importantly, pulled my emphasis away from social impact. I stood at an impasse: How could Reel Gardening stay true to its foundational goals to make gardening accessible for all income levels and stay afloat?

I had conversations with corporations, governments and NGOs to find ways for us to partner, but no one would take the leap. I searched high and low for investors willing to take a risk on a new agricultural technology that wasn’t geared toward large-scale farmers, but instead for everyday people – some with limited incomes – and no one would come on board.

In 2013, Reel Gardening discovered Securing Water for Food (SWFF), a Grand Challenge for Development partnership between the United State Agency for International Development (USAID), Sweden (through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, or Sida), the government of South Africa, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. SWFF works to fund and accelerate technology-based solutions that enable more food to be produced with less water in developing countries. Such solutions are few and far between in my experience. We applied for funding that year and won, a move I now see as pivotal for our company.

With $1.5 M in funding from SWFF, I was able to scale Reel Gardening when few others were interested in investing in us. Not only did SWFF address our funding gap, it provided the technical assistance we needed to grow our business in an emerging market. This is important for people like me who, while they have a great idea, do not have a formal background in business development and entrepreneurship.

SWFF helped us with the results-driven business development, commercial growth and scaling we needed to move forward. They pushed us to establish gardens in schools, which became a great marketing asset for us within several communities. With this increased exposure, Reel Gardening leveraged better relationships with local agents and trainers to represent the company and expand revenue, all while making a difference in those communities.

Now, SWFF is helping us enter the mainstream retail market, incorporating a Buy One, Give One (BOGO) concept. This will help us leverage the profits from commercial sales to subsidize our work with schools and the poor. Through a technical support vendor, SWFF is helping us assess our business model to identify our strengths and weaknesses, and performing a feasibility analysis of the BOGO model. Our goal is a commercially viable, high-quality product. As part of this analysis, the vendor is taking a critical look at the company’s customer segmentation and its pricing model. In addition to a recommendation to proceed with the model, it is also creating a business plan and a financial model for us. This will serve as our strategic blueprint for the next five years.

And the impact, you ask? Reel Gardening has enabled 470,433 people to grow their own food, saving more than 34 million liters of water and produced 1,200 tons of produce on 47 hectares of land. We  have expanded beyond South Africa’s borders and are looking to expand in the U.K. and the U.S., and potentially Dubai and Japan. After two and a half years of SWFF support, Reel Gardening has generated over $580,000 in sales and partnerships. We trained more than 800 women and 1,500 children in organic farming, which has led our alums to found 16 independent microenterprises.

What I learned as a social entrepreneur was never to give up. SWFF helped us close our funding gap and helped us learn the skills we needed to make our impact dreams a reality.

This blog is a part of the June 2017 series on advisory support for inclusive businesses in partnership with USAID and the African Agricultural Fund’s Technical Assistance Facility, both of which deliver advisory support and have new analysis of it just launched (AAF’s TAF) and forthcoming (USAID).

Read the full series for more lessons from seven different providers of advisory support and stories of success from entrepreneurs.

Claire Reid is the CEO and founder of Reel Gardening in South Africa.
Photo courtesy of Reel Gardening.

A similar version of this article was originally published by Next Billion.