Amadumbe profile: the underground staple
Amadumbe is one of Africa’s most underrated root crops. Grown beneath the soil, it carries quiet nutritional power — energy,...
Indigenous food systems
Africa's food future is
already
in the ground.
Shiriki is repositioning indigenous crops at the centre of climate-resilient agriculture and inclusive value chains — through shared infrastructure, living knowledge, and community roots.
What we do
Four interconnected functions
We are not a single farming project. We are the platform that connects the
pieces — seed knowledge, land, infrastructure, training, and markets.
01
Seed systems & knowledge
Community seed library across 20–40 African indigenous varieties. Germination documentation, research partnerships, and an open-access plant database built over five years.
02
Pilot farm & production
Indigenous crop cultivation under agroecological principles at our demonstration site in Muldersdrift/Krugersdorp — a training venue, seed multiplication ground, and research platform.
03
Shared infrastructure
Processing, cold storage, equipment access, and aggregation support shared across smallholder farmers — reducing post-harvest losses and enabling market access at a viable scale.
04
Training & extension
Free, accreditation-ready courses in agroecology, soil health, and agripreneurship. A digital knowledge platform and Shiriki Growers Circle connecting farmers with resources and markets.
Africa's foundation crops
Amadumbe · Cowpeas· So rghum · Morogo · Lablab · Jute
mallow · Slenderleaf · Bambara groundnut · Spider plant
These are not exotic foods. They are what African food systems were built on.
The challenge
Nutritious, resilient, and structurally excluded
Indigenous crops are not absent from African markets because they failed. They are absent because of underinvestment, absent seed systems, inaccessible infrastructure, market exclusion, and a cultural narrative that frames them as inferior.
Each of these is a solvable problem. Shiriki addresses all five simultaneously — through demonstration, knowledge, shared infrastructure, and the kind of coordinated action that individual farmers cannot achieve alone.
90%
of Africa’s cultivated crop varieties lost in a century
9×
more protein in amadumbe than in a potato
20+
indigenous varieties in the Shiriki seed collection
5 yrs
of piloting and building across Gauteng
This is not a return to the past. It is a re-anchoring of the future in what already works.
From the Shiriki journal
Indigenous crop knowledge, openly shared
Research, growing guides, and stories from the field.
The jute mallow opportunity
Jute mallow is more than a leafy vegetable — it is a cultural ingredient deeply rooted in African cuisine. Known...
Nitrogen fixers: how plants feed the soil
Some plants do something extraordinary — they feed the soil instead of just consuming from it. Through a natural relationship...
Crops We Work With