While working in an office job in Pretoria, South Africa, Sindi Mbambo recognized an opportunity to help her community live a healthier lifestyle. Sindi noticed her colleagues were too busy or too sick to prepare nutritious food, and were settling instead for quick, insalubrious meals. So she started peeling…
Isaac Bohulu’s idea for a natural medicine business was literally rooted in his backyard. The pharmacist from Accra, Ghana used extracts from a large Neem tree behind his house to create Neemfresh, an herbal mouthwash. After entering his idea to produce a commercial version of this mouthwash in TechnoServe’s…
Gerald and Rosemary Muthomi grew up in poor farming families on the foothills of Mt. Kenya. Determined to improve people's lives, they became government agricultural advisors. But they soon realized that it wasn't enough for small-scale farmers to grow more produce; they also needed opportunities to sell it to…
Standing in a chicken shed in a remote part of South Africa, with a makeshift whiteboard and a local resident serving as a translator, Ryan Drake-Lee considered his challenge: to persuade the members of Masana Poultry Farm to reinvest some of their slim earnings into their cooperative. Drawing on…
Strolling down a beach beside a 16th-century fortress wall, Joana Freitas and Rory Campbell saw that Ilha de Moçambique (an island off the northern coast of Mozambique) could become a world-class tourism destination. A UNESCO World Heritage site, Ilha (as it was known to centuries of traders) held beauty…
Cecilia Natike, 25, is the proud owner of a beauty salon in the Mathare slum of Nairobi, Kenya. She opened her business in 2009 after participating in TechnoServe’s Young Entrepreneurs program.
Evelyn Windhager Swanson, a longstanding supporter of TechnoServe, writes about her travels in Rwanda.
Brighton Makuvaza's experience as the administrator of TechnoServe’s Agro Innovation Zimbabwe business plan competition has shown him the promise of the agricultural sector to change lives in poor areas of Zimbabwe.
African agriculture is poised for a boom. But will increased investor and business activity translate into higher rural incomes and a better quality of life for Africa’s smallholder farmers?
A TechnoServe staffer writes about her experience at a TechnoServe training workshop for cotton farmers in Swaziland.
