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Afropreneur Spotlight

Meet Yvette Ondachi, The Entrepreneur Revolutionising Agriculture in Kenya

Uwem April 12, 2017 166


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What makes Yvette so special and inspiring to us?

Why would she quits a well paying job and focus on a venture that had a high probability of failing?

Why is she so passionate?

Reading articles on her didn’t do enough justice to her personality and love for the African continent, we discovered so much when we had a chat with her.

Yvette Ondachi is a Kenyan Agro-Preneur and the CEO of Ojay Greene, a company that works with smallholder farmers to remove the barriers that limit them and give them access to markets through technology, therefore increasing their earnings. Also testament to the efficacy of her model is that Farmers who participate increase their income by five times over five years.

Yvette, who quit her marketing job, ending a 15-year career with pharma giants AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, isn’t new to failure.  She made big investments in greenhouse tomato farming in eastern Kenya which ran losses for 5 years. This didn’t deter her, instead she went back to the farm and did it right, learning from her mistakes. That year she made everything she lost and even doubled on her revenue the next year.

“What changed is I tested the soil, and I was more aware of the risks,” she says. She believes this was her ‘research’ phase which equipped her to be a better entrepreneur.

It was her experiences, and interactions with smallholder farmers, who were also making losses, that inspired Yvette to start her company Ojay Greene.

What motivates her? What advice does she have for entrepreneurs in Africa?

Listen to Yvette chat with us and discuss why Entrepreneurship is important in reducing poverty.

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