Strategic Initiatives Team

• Location: Madrid, Spain
• Joined TechnoServe: 2014 (Fellow in 2006/07 in Guatemala)

• What did you do before joining the Strategic Initiatives team?
  • I was a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company for five years, where I advised top management of $10 billion agribusiness and consumer good corporations and public sector clients on emerging market growth strategies, partnerships for economic development, and sales and operations transformations. Projects spanned across the Americas and Sub Saharan Africa. 
• Why did you decide to join TechnoServe and the Strategic Initiatives team?
  • My dream job was to work in a corporate environment building inclusive supply chains, but those jobs were scarce 10 years ago. I reconnected with TechnoServe almost by chance, and it happened to be precisely at the right time. They were building a team to drive growth of corporate partnerships through shared value and were looking for former consultants with experience in economic development.
  • I was totally bought into TechnoServe’s vision to take 500 million people out of poverty by embedding their small businesses into corporate supply chains, whether as suppliers or end consumers. It was exactly what I had left McKinsey to pursue. This role would allow me to work closely with multiple companies leading in the space, getting exposure to different value chains and geographies. I was also attracted by the nature of the team: mission-driven, smart and humble former consultants, eager to apply their skills and knowledge to the most complex challenges in our world, to ending poverty.
• What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on?
  • It is tough to choose one. Every project relates to people, and every one is unique in its own way, but I do have a special bond with the Nespresso Zimbabwe Reviving Origins Program, partly because I’ve seen it grow from a concept on PPT slides into real, physical upgrades on people’s houses and farms [as a result of income improvements]. And it’s partly because of the speed at which this impact has materialized – in just one or two years, you could already see communities transformed.
  • I led the initial diagnostic that validated the opportunity to “save” a coffee origin that was literally about to disappear, while also uplifting the families that grew that coffee. I felt I was in a movie as I heard firsthand stories from 80-year old coffee growers and saw the light in younger coffee farmers’ eyes getting brighter as we talked about the potential of supporting them to recover their farms.
  • I was extremely touched when I was welcomed back with singing and dancing two years later, and people remembered me by name. A woman called Anna held my hand and took me to see how she had cemented the floor of her kitchen and installed a toilet, thanks to her coffee earnings. 
  • I am inspired by the fact that the son of one of the farmers we visited during the diagnostic is now an agronomist on the TechnoServe team, teaching hundreds of other farmers about coffee, inspiring other youth to start their own coffee farms, and crafting a very promising career for himself.

These are the kinds of things that get me out of bed every morning.

• How have you applied your consulting skills to your work on the Strategic Initiatives team?
  • I use the consulting skills I gained at McKinsey every day in my work. I would highlight three key aspects:
    • Core consulting toolkit (approach to problem-solving). It’s critical to building the business case for shared value (value to the company and impact to the communities). Simple things like 80/20 mindset: figure out what is the 20% that drives 80% of the answer, and focus on solving that vs. trying to learn everything you can. 
    • Top down, simple, crisp, communications, using their own business terms. It’s critical to bring our corporate partners on board, and not lose them with development jargon and long-winded analytics. In many cases, telling the story through visuals (images combined with key figures or strong charts) can be even more powerful. 
    • Building relationships. Scaling our partnerships with corporates requires much more than a business case. It requires people to trust you as an individual, to welcome you to be part of their team and to want to share experiences with you. And in that process you get to know what inspires them, understand their business, identify the value drivers and strategic objectives, and who and how decisions are made. 
• What aspect of your job do you find most fulfilling?
  • If I had to choose one thing, I’d say the chance to build something from scratch (e.g. a concept on a slide) and be part of its growth, witnessing the real impact on the ground, on people with names and faces that I can recognize. Anna in Zimbabwe, Jose in Puerto Rico, Bilha in Kenya, Hundatu in Ethiopia, Rejina in South Sudan, and many more.

• Location: Nairobi, Kenya
• Joined TechnoServe: September, 2022

• What did you do before joining the Strategic Initiatives team?
  • I worked for 2 years in the Strategic Initiatives team where I completed advisory projects for TechnoServe’s corporate clients, including Nespresso and AB InBev. Before that, I was a strategy consultant at LEK, based in London for four years.
• Why did you decide to join TechnoServe and the Strategic Initiatives team?
  • I worked for the Inclusive Investment team as a Fellow for six months in 2021 and was based in Kenya working for a local company Kentaste, the largest regional producer of coconut products. I found it to be an incredibly rewarding combination to support a business to scale and help smallholder farmers simultaneously through using my consulting skills. I decided to join TechnoServe full time and haven’t looked back since!
• What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on?
  • We get the opportunity to work with a diverse range of businesses and impact investors so it’s hard to pick one! I have worked on developing a package of pre-investment support that included developing a digital production monitoring system for a business that produces black soldier fly larvae for animal feed and a package of post-investment support for a trader of fresh fruits and vegetables that focused on supporting farmers to adopt new products & services that can enable them to adopt more efficient and climate-smart practices.
• How have you applied your consulting skills to your work on the Strategic Initiatives team?
  • I use the consulting skills I learnt in London every day. The businesses we work with co-invest into the initiatives we design with them and still require rigorous analysis when considering whether to co-invest. I also manage Fellows day-to-day who come from strategy consulting firms to work with our partner businesses.
• What aspect of your job do you find most fulfilling?
  • Meeting with the smallholder farmers that we support and hearing not just their challenges but also how they’ve been able to build their livelihoods and support their families through the businesses’ we work with. I’ve also been lucky enough to visit Kentaste, the business I supported as a Fellow, three years after my time as a Fellow and see how they, and the smallholder farmers they support, have grown.

• Location: New York, US
• Joined TechnoServe: 2023
• 
• What did you do before joining the Strategic Initiatives team? 
  • Management consultant at Oliver Wyman for 1.5 years.
• Why did you decide to join TechnoServe and the Strategic Initiatives team? 
  • I've always been drawn to international development, saving whenever possible to travel and endlessly fascinated in trying to understand the political, social and economic differences between countries wherever I went. My curiosity led me deep into books, courses, and eventually to a summer internship with TechnoServe’s Strategic Initiatives team. There, I was excited to learn more about not only how different systems evolve, but also how diverse actors can collaborate to create impact and tackle growing inequality. I ended the internship fully committed to TechnoServe’s mission and approach of using the private sector to drive sustainable impact, and was thrilled to return to the team full-time after a stint in consulting.
• What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on?
  • One of my favorite projects was part of the CASA Plus program, which aimed to unlock financing for agribusinesses in Nigeria in partnership with FCDO, BII, and FMO. The challenge was immense: a $180 billion financing gap for agribusinesses, a national food security crisis, and a weakened currency that discouraged foreign investment. However, the potential impact was significant—by connecting agribusinesses with the financing they needed and helping them address their main challenges, they could become key players in addressing Nigeria’s food security issues. After an in-depth research phase, interviewing 50+ agribusiness founders, impact investors, and commercial banks, we developed a tailored technical assistance program. Since launching the pilot, the program has started providing agribusinesses with investment readiness training, growth plan support, and introductions to potential investors. To me, this project was a great example of the strength of the Strategic Initiatives team’s approach to impact: empowering local entrepreneurial actors to tackle urgent challenges rather than imposing a “one-size-fits-all” solution.
• How have you applied your consulting skills to your work on the Strategic Initiatives team?
  • I find myself using core consulting skills every day, from project and stakeholder management to analysis and slide design. However, what excites me even more is how my recent work in the Strategic Initiatives team has driven me to significantly deepen these skills. While my past projects in management consulting were diverse, they were mostly U.S.-based and often addressed familiar challenges that the firm had tackled before. In contrast, Strategic Initiatives projects are far broader in scope, spanning regions worldwide and addressing complex, systemic issues. These projects have pushed me to grow as a listener and collaborator in order to effectively learn from and work closely with individuals directly rooted in the local contexts of these projects.
• What aspect of your job do you find most fulfilling?
  • The most fulfilling part of this job has been the chance to collaborate with entrepreneurial individuals worldwide and witness the sustainable, on-the-ground impact we can achieve together. Our team’s approach focuses on working within existing local systems, rather than creating new ones, to empower already entrepreneurial people—such as microentrepreneurs and farmers—as agents of change. It's incredibly inspiring to support people, not through direct aid or handouts, but by enabling individuals, communities, and organizations to lead their own development.