Women Accelerator's Programme: Meet the mentees | Part VI
Women in business are at the heart of FAO’s mandate to reduce rural poverty and achieve food security for all.
That’s why in October 2022, 50 women entrepreneurs working in the agrifood sector across Sub-Saharan Africa were chosen to participate in the first year of the FAO-IAFN Women’s Accelerator Mentorship Programme for Women-led SMEs in Africa.
Participants were selected from an open call for expressions of interest by a panel of experts from FAO and IAFN.
CONNECT Portal will be regularly featuring the stories of the hard-working women who took part in the programme. You can read the second in our series of articles on these women below.
Aminata Karankay
Aminata Karankay is the CEO of Sorogbema Agricultural Company, a business that she and her family created five years ago to work with rural women in Sierra Leone. Since then, they have been helping women to produce marketable food crops for sale through small micro-credit revolving loans.
The company currently works with women in the community to implement self-sponsored village savings and loan associations (VSLAs). It also engages in food-crop production such as rice, cassava, sweet corn, and varieties of vegetables. Sorogbema is also involved in processing cassava into gari supplementary food for sale.
Sorogbema is a limited liability company whose shares have been bought by rural women, and every year profits accruing are shared among shareholders.
Chidinma Ezeh
Chidinma Ezeh is a global poverty fighter, a soil and soilless vegetable farmer and the team lead at FarmCAS in Nigeria. FarmCAS is a technology enabled agricultural human resources firm solving the inequality of employment in the agricultural space by screening, training and connecting farm workers to farmers and agricultural firms for improved productivity and better livelihoods.
Through the use of a digital platform and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code for human capacity development and management, the company provides three key solutions to address the identified employment gap in the agricultural sector: training and connecting skilled workers to recruiters, farm consultancy training and staff management, and connecting farmers to screened and trained farm workers.
Given that Nigeria's population is expected to reach over 400 million by 2050, there will always be a need for agricultural workers to meet the country's food supply needs. FarmCAS trainings improve the workers' knowledge and make sure they have the skills they need for production.
Janefrances Nkiruka Ighosewe
Janefrances Nkiruka Ighosewe is the founder of Something Lite, a healthy food processing firm that produces a range of items including granola, natural jam made from 100 percent fruit, yogurt, juices, smoothies, bread, and cookies created from whole wheat grains and oats.
The business sources its raw materials from local small-scale farmers and pastoralists, aiding them by decreasing post-harvest losses and increasing the shelf life of their products.
With her background in health science, Janefrances has chosen to focus on resolving issues within the food production sector while at the same time advocating for gender equality. Along with her work, she invests her time and resources in reducing the gender bias gap.
