Like all of TechnoServe’s business plan competitions, Africa’s first Believe Begin Become, held in 2006, was the work of many partners. More than 70 supporters— ranging from Ghanaian academics and businesses to international corporations— contributed money, products or services. This ensured that by the time Joseph Tackie took first prize…
Using the business skills she learned through Young Women in Enterprise, 24-year-old Cecilia Katungwa (left) launched a a shop selling knitted goods. TechnoServe recently received a new grant from the Nike Foundation to continue an initiative to economically and socially empower young women in Kenya through 2012. The Young…
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…
The Connected Farmer Alliance (CFA) is a public-private partnership that seeks to promote commercially sustainable mobile agriculture solutions and increase productivity and revenues for 500,000 smallholder farmers across Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. The program also aims to increase revenues for agribusinesses and agricultural value chain service providers.
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.
