Women's SME Accelerator Programme: Meet the mentees | Part X
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 tenth in our series of articles on these women below.
Margret Paida Moyo
Margret Paida Moyo is a 27-year-old farmer from Zimbabwe. She ventured into agriculture full-time in 2019 and registered her company to treat farming as a business. Margret is a cofounder and director at Little Blackwood Farm, where she and three other cofounders have set up a vibrant agribusiness enterprise that specializes in horticulture, project management and consultancy. In 2019 she was awarded the Entrepreneur of the Year by STAR Leadership Academy for Agriculture.
Her company, Little Blackwood Farm, grows horticultural crops including potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, beans, and maize, as well as chickens at a commercial scale. The company also offers consultancy services to young emerging farmers and schools.
Margret recently launched a student farmer club which focuses on mentorship of students in universities and colleges who want to venture into farming. The club also helps to bridge the information gap between schools and the real agricultural industry students are taken to different companies in the sector and they familiarize with their future employers. The club plays a role in helping students to get internship placements as well at different farms and companies.
Pauline Otila
Pauline Otila is the founder of Apiculture Venture Limited and Golden Bee Honey products, which between them have created employment for 17 young Kenyans. She is ambitious and describes social inclusion as her driving force, having set up a programme where women and youth can take up beekeeping as an income generating activity.
Apiculture Venture Limited is a social enterprise and a key player in Kenya’s honey and beekeeping industry, with a unique business model that solves inefficiencies in the apiculture value chain. The enterprise collaborates with hundreds of small-holder beekeepers, particularly youths and women, to enable them access and set-up modern hives through training, extension support services, commercial honey and wax production, processing and value addition, packaging, and marketing high quality organic honey.
In addition to processing and selling honey and wax in their natural forms, Apiculture Venture Limited’s has a variety of value-added healthy and nutritious by-products the enterprise sells under the Golden Bee Beehive Products Brand. From wax, they make hand and body jelly, lip balms, wax strips and wax sheets, and scented candle wax. From honey, they make flavoured chocolates, creamed honey, and are currently piloting flavoured honey.
Precious Awesome
Dr. Precious Awesome is a biotechnologist and phytotherapist from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria and the president and founder of PROFYD Inc, a non-governmental organization through which she has trained more than 10,000 youths on free skills acquisition and mental re-orientation.
In 2016, Dr. Awesome founded Awesome God Agro Allied Industries Limited (AGAAI), a private LTD liability company, with a vision of stamping out hunger and poverty in local communities. AGAAI provides solutions to farmers, producing organic crops nutrients and distributing them to farmers at discounted rates. The company also converts agro waste to wealth and is currently producing eco-friendly paper, fiber and fertilizer. AGAAI has a particular focus on plantain and banana production throughout the crops’ entire value chain. The firm aims at using the untapped and enormous natural resources of these crops to manufacture world-class products and establish chain of industries to create jobs and wealth.
Dr. Awesome is passionate about seeing a society free of hunger and poverty, and her company, AGAAI LTD, is pioneering a citizen’s wealth creation program – NAWECRAD – designed to bring prosperity and wealth to communities. Dr Awesome is also the president of the Positive Thinkers Club, Just40CluB Africa, and Single's Forum International.
“I am truly grateful and thankful to FAO, IAFN and partners for organizing such an amazing program and counting me worthy to partake. I must confess that it was quite impactful and I now know how to operate my business profitably.”
~ Precious Awesome
Rabecca Atuhaire
Rabecca Atuhaire’s enterprise Agrisensor Technologies is a platform that enables low-income earners to access agricultural commodities for sale on credit as well as access to ready markets to prevent post-harvest losses and promote financial security among women. The company also provides financial assistance to women in the Kalerwe market.
These women sell much-needed goods including tomatoes, onions, mangoes, pineapples and bananas. By providing them with weekly sums of money, Rabecca’s enterprise improves the livelihoods of low-income women in her communities by enabling business sustainability, trade, affordable credit facilities and low-cost financial services.
Rabecca specialises in building resilience of ICT and agriculture to major hazards and has worked in both sectors for six years. She has an interest in technology, agriculture, public health and social care. By rethinking how knowledge is produced, challenging current economic models, and identifying overlooked social and political dynamics, her approach places notions of well-being, institutional change, citizenship, and social justice at the focal point of her research. She has six years working over Africa and is committed to involving grassroot communities in the production of food and women empowerment in agricultural business.
