Women's SME Accelerator Programme: Meet the mentees | Part IX

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 ninth in our series of articles on these women below. 

Lilian Uwintwali

Lilian Uwintwali is the founder and CEO of Mahwi Tech, an award-winning agritech firm with a mission to digitize agriculture in Africa that currently links more than 20,000 smallholder farmers in Rwanda to markets. Mahwi Tech has developed and deployed the MLIMA Platform to address demand and supply chain gaps in agriculture using digital technologies and serving smallholder farmers, with a strong emphasis on women.

Using MLIMA Platform, smallholder farmers and farming cooperatives have access to a cooperative management system that digitizes all farmers operations and transactions as well as an online marketplace where cooperatives are able to publish and sell their yields online on a larger exposed market and attract buyers who offer competitive prices for their commodities.

Lynnet Nakidde

Lynnet Nakidde is the founder and CEO of the Biofertilizer Centre For Youth Empowerment, a Uganda-based company that produces different kinds of organic fertilizers. Lynnet's company produces and sells 100 percent organic fertilizers, including bocashi, vermi-compost and tea plant-based fertilizers. True to its name, the Biofertilizer Centre for Youth Empowerment also provides training for local youth on the manufacture and application of these kinds of organic fertilizers. These fertilizers are produced and sold together with the youth around the greater Masaka region in Uganda in order to improve youth standards of living, address agroecology and also protect and conserve the environment.

Marcelline Koutatouka 

Marcelline Koutatouka, née Dinzébi Boukondzo, is an engineer in tropical agronomy and the manager of MkTOTO Sarl. MkTOTO specialises in the production of banana sprouts and processing of agricultural products. The company, which operates out of Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo, was set up with the goal of using all effective means to facilitate and develop economic activity by improving and increasing the results of the agricultural activities carried out by its customers. Marcelline Koutatouka currently works as an independent consultant specializing in the production and processing of agricultural products as well as livestock activities. She has participated in several training workshops abroad in the Seychelles, Uganda, Chad and Ghana. Marcelline is also the initiator of the celebration in Pointe-Noire of the World Food Days, organized for the first time in 2010 at the Consular Chamber of Pointe-Noire and celebrated each year on October 16 across the world.

“The programme was a great experience and will stay with me for the rest of my life. I learned a lot from the mentoring sessions. What's more, we've forged good relationships that will continue beyond the mentoring period”

~ Marcelline Koutatouka

Oluyemisi Iranloye

Oluyemisi Iranloye is the founder and managing director of Psaltry International Limited (PIL), an indigenous agro-allied company established in 2005 to market cassava produce, later expanding its business line to the production of food-grade starch and our in 2013. The business was established to create an inclusive business model putting smallholder farmers in the centre stage supplying the company with its raw materials. PIL provided an avenue where subsistence farmers were trained to become commercial cassava farmers and has created a supply chain involving above 10,000 farm families. In 2018, Psaltry took the giant stride to construct the First Cassava Based Sorbitol Factory in Africa and the second in the world after Indonesia, manufacturing the major ingredient used in the production of toothpaste.

Over ten years of active operations, Psaltry International’s asset base has increased from $1million to about $15million, creating direct and indirect job opportunities for about 10,000 people, with about 60 percent of them being women and youth. PIL estimates that this employment has grown the earning power of the host community from less than $1 a day to about $10 daily from their day-to-day supply of cassava tubers to the factory.

“My mentor Margaret [Munene, the CEO of Palmhouse Dairy Ltd] was a great help and guided me through the setting up of my education foundation. I have started my foundation already and we had our first awardees last August and they started school in September.”

~ Oluyemisi Iranloye