Phones4Bees: Charity Wanting Used Phones

We are a small local software and beekeeping business, called Bee.Watch This year we continue our work in this field developing apps and beekeeping innovations, however, we also have an exciting collaboration with a not for profit organisation in Kenya, working to help African bee farmers out of poverty and we are starting this project with our phones4bees campaign.

Appealing to people to donate their disused phones to the campaign. The phones will be used for the bee farmers to store their hive records, beekeeping qualifications records and provide secure payment to them. This payment is for the honey they provide to the local community honey processing hubs that the project is setting up. The idea is to increase the farmers access to markets including the export markets, something that small rural bee farmer, that are living hand to mouth don't currently have, by providing resources and business support we hope to help them grow their production and therefore increase their income security. And by promoting beekeeping this has shown in similar projects to encourage increased biodiversity in an area due to the increased motivation to provide extra forage for the bees.

This is also a business that refugees can undertake who have no land to help them re-build their lives. We currently have the interest of 8 African countries. Burundi, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Somalia, South Africa and Uganda.

There are boxes in Just Trading and Bee zero in Wallingford for local people to donate their phones, or they can post them to us or email phones4bees@gmail.com for a postage label and jiffy bag.

For more information see: https://uwatch.co.uk/launch-of-phones4bees/.