While pursuing a master’s degree in the Ashesi ETH Zurich Mechatronic Engineering program, Eleazar Archer M’24 and his colleagues co-founded MESADA PCL, an agritech startup. The venture is focused on developing a planter that will enable farmers use fewer inputs and achieve higher yields.
With initial funding from the Ashesi Design Lab and later support from the Ashesi Venture Incubator (AVI), the team built and refined their prototype. Subsequently, it was piloted on selected commercial farms and is currently undergoing an upgrade to expand the planter from a three-row to a six-row system with increased speed and planting efficiency.
The journey that led Archer to MESADA began long before he arrived at Ashesi. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he worked on factory design and utility systems in Ghana’s Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector, contributing to the design of manufacturing facilities and industrial utility infrastructure; yet he recognized the need to expand beyond traditional mechanical engineering.
The combination of automation and production engineering in the Ashesi–ETH Zurich Master’s in Mechatronics Engineering drew him to the program. Enrolling, he encountered its rigor, which left little room to defer effort until tests or quizzes. “You have just a short time to understand something completely new and be expected to apply it immediately,” Archer recounts. The pace of learning, he mentions, “pushed him beyond his mechanical engineering foundation, requiring him to build competencies in Python and control systems.”
These skills came in handy across several projects. For instance, he worked with a team to develop a compact indoor vegetable-growing system to address the challenge of limited backyard gardening space in urban settings. On another project, he contributed to the design of a constrained robotic system capable of navigating a defined path and crossing a trench. The work required integrating mechanical design, sensing, and control within strict size and component constraints. “After a while, I felt more comfortable handling projects that were of different engineering dimensions other than what I was used to,” Archer admits.
