Women Accelerator's Programme: Meet the mentees | Part VII
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.
Dorah Momanyi
Dorah Momanyi is a part-time lecturer at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and the founder of the Nutritious Agriculture Network/iPoP Africa. iPoP Africa is an agribusiness initiative using an energy-efficient and environmentally friendly popping technology – a processing technique in which grains are exposed to high temperatures for a short time until the kernel bursts through the outer skin like popcorn – to reclaim the sovereignty of indigenous cereals such as sorghum and millet.
Her company, which also processes breakfast cereals and snack bars, aims to give people healthier, plant-forward snacks bringing robust ethnic flavours without giving up their moments of indulgence.
Their snacks come in different flavours of herbs and spices such as chili, cinnamon, garlic, cardamom, lemon, and mint. iPop Africa uses a popping technology that has a 96% yield with no waste streams that need to be treated, resulting in a 1:5 ratio of raw materials to end product.
The company promotes ethical consumption values through reusable packaging and increasing the country’s ever-diminishing forest cover through their One Snack One Tree initiative.
Maria Shipapo
Maria Shipapo is the cofounder and CEO of MIST Agricultural Laboratory (MISTAL) based in Rundu in Namibia's Kavango East Region.
MISTAL works closely with emerging subsistence farmers by testing their soil and recommending the varieties of crops that are best suited to their soil type as well as climatic setting. MISTAL also recommends rainwater harvesting techniques and structures for farmers and offers them integrated pest management guidance.
In addition to this support and capacity building, MISTAL also adds value to indigenous varieties of beans, nuts and fruit that is seasonally sourced from the Kavango and Zambezi region woodland forests.
Edith Mpoto
Edith Mpoto is a mother of two from Malawi’s Nkhotakota District and the managing director of Nkhotakota Steadfast Cooperations for Youth (NS4Y). Edith, who previously struggled to access education and secure a job herself, established NS4Y as a means of taking care of her family's needs while at the same time supporting other young women having a hard time finding work and training.
NS4Y is an agribusiness-focused social enterprise composed of young women and men aged 16 to 35 years. It aims to improve the economic and social conditions for its members as well as the surrounding communities. NS4Y works with women and young farmers to produce and process agricultural products including groundnuts, rice, fish and fruit.
The enterprise, which Edith established in 2021, provides capacity building through training, ongoing mentorship and high-quality farm inputs such as seeds. NS4Y improves access to these agricultural products, particularly during the lean season, when job opportunities are scarce, incomes plummet and food prices rise.
NS4Y is a democratically governed organisation with a management committee elected by its 69 members. Through a participatory decision-making process, members work jointly to identify business opportunities, brainstorm ideas and develop an action plan and budget.
Nadia Niwemugeni
Nadia Niwemugeni is an agribusiness consultant with Cupper Beans Ltd, a Rwandan coffee trading company that is slowly expanding to the international market. Their unique focus is on delivering the highest quality coffees and to their consumers across the globe.
Cupper Beans Ltd’s coffee is grown in Nyamasheke District, one of Rwanda’s major coffee-producing areas located in the nation’s southwest on the shores of Lake Kivu. This region’s elevation, soil, and climate places their coffee among the most celebrated in the region. The coffee crop is shade grown under structurally and floristically diverse shade covers while applying only organic fertilizers and less harmful alternatives to pesticides and fungicides. Both these practices of using organic fertilizers and planting shade tree go a long way in providing not only the necessary plant nutrition but also assist in providing the complex nutrient balance of their coffee fields needed to produce nutrient-rich fruit.
Esther Unathi Sihlahla
Esther Unathi Sihlahla is the project leader of the Pella Food Garden, where she manages the group's admin and financials as well as working in the fields herself as her father and grandparents taught her. The Pella Food Garden, which is made up of five permanent members and three contract workers, specialises in aquaponics, traditional crop production and growing seedlings.
The Pella Food Garden runs an aquaponics enterprise that combines soilless crop production and fish farming in a solar-powered, symbiotic closed system. This system generates ten times the amount of produce as conventional agriculture in the same space using 90 percent less water. The system also eliminates the need for chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.
Esther’s project incorporates rainwater harvesting to supply the systems and solar power to sustain their limited energy needs, further establishing aquaponics as a resource-efficient climate adaptation solution. This aquaponics system design supports sufficient production to strengthen not only nutritious food security, providing protein from fish and varied, nutrient-rich vegetables, but also to supply consistent volumes of high-quality, in-demand produce to commercial markets.
