Toni Hassenmeier

Toni calls himself Development Economist for Sustainable Change. He worked 7 years for Siemens AG, trained as accountant with an executive MBA. At Siemens he gained first hand experience in with developing mobile network applications, being Commercial Project and Product Manager. Working one year in South Africa he decided to change his career and enrolled for a Master in International Development Studies.

During his Masters Programme he showed interest in Development Planning and rural development. He joined Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and worked as Advisor to the Zambian Ministry of Finance and National Planning for 6 years.

Seeing lots of business opportunities in the agricultural sector in Zambia and beyond, he decided to research why these opportunities were not exploited. While governments often focus on missing infrastructure, he is convinced the missing link is information and forming business plans.

He is responsible for the business strategy and project coordination of gaipa. He oversees all activities in Zambia and other African Countries.

"I have seen many politicians, civil servants and professors who think they know what is good for farmers or poor people. This is arrogant and often they are wrong. gaipa is for me the way to enable farmers of all backgrounds to make informed decisions and not depend on others any longer."

Maik Derstappen

Maik is a software developer with more than 15 years of experience. He is developing Python based backend systems and content management systems since 2005 and has done various frontend user interfaces based on Javascript, jQuery and modern MVC JS-Frameworks like Aurelia, Vue or Riot. He is also very interested in progressive web apps and is running a hosting company which provides email and webservices, for more than 15 years.

In our team Maik is responsible for Backend (Plone CMS) and Frontend (Aurelia JS) development.

"When Toni and Jan came to me with his ideas about gaipa, it was clear for me, that I have to help them on this mission, with my technical expertise. It's also a lot of fun for me, to use some modern technologies like the progressive web app approach to build the app."

Jan Schwabe

Jan brings experience from the IT world as well as from working with small-scale farmers at their farms to the team.
Working several years as freelancer he is familiar with today's techniques in the development of web applications and server administration.

Being co-founder of a renewable energy start-up that offers solutions to reduce post-harvest losses for small-scale farmers in tropical regions, brings the service provider perspective to team. For this start-up he has been in close exchange with small-scale farmers, especially in India, over the past 4 years. In this time he experienced their needs and pain points on site.

"Access to reliable information is essential to make good decisions. gaipa can be a way to meet this need of peasants."

Juan Antonio Guzman-Hidalgo

Juan is a telecommunication engineer specialized in multimedia content.  His background was evolving from Web and Flash development, media servers to game development, Augmented and Virtual Reality. He also founded and organization in Spain to support apps and games for the Common Good.

In our team, he is putting a bit of light from his android app market experience and is also responsible to take care about the image content, UI, CSS and layout in different devices.

"Technology is the there to serve people and solve problems, and definitely, gaipa is our contribution. In the right direction and with the right technical solution."