Category: African Regenerative Frontrunners

Janet Maro — Farmers are the architects, not the audience

6th May 2026 julia African Regenerative Frontrunners, Regenerative Agriculture, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

When Janet Maro started building training programs with farmers in Tanzania, she didn’t arrive with a curriculum. She asked farmers what they knew, what they needed, and what they could bring to the table — and built from there. That instinct, to treat farmers as the architects rather than the audience, turns out to explain most of what makes Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania unusual: why groups keep meeting and planning years after projects end, why an organic shop opened in Morogoro in 2012 has since seeded eight more across the country, and why a conflict between Maasai pastoralists and smallholder farmers that had turned violent was resolved not through outside intervention but through a simple exchange of manure and crop residues, negotiated by the communities themselves.

Sylvia Kuria — Farmers should grow their own food first

24th April 2026 julia African Regenerative Frontrunners, Diet Change, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

Sylvia Kuria started with a kitchen garden and a refusal to use chemicals on food for her newborn. Seventeen years later, she runs Sylvia’s Basket, aggregates organic produce across Kenya, trains smallholder farmers on half-acre plots, and helped get agroecology written into county government development plans with real budget behind it. The journey from that first bottle of pesticides to a funded policy win is not a straight line — and the business realities along the way are rarely the ones that make the headlines.
The question running through this conversation is deceptively simple: should farmers feed themselves first, before thinking about any market? Sylvia’s answer, grounded in seventeen years of practice, has implications for how we think about food security, monocropping, market access, and who gets to sit at the table where decisions are made.

Kofi Boa — You can see soil health in a single season

10th April 2026 julia African Regenerative Frontrunners, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

African soils were once so alive, nobody called it regeneration, the land just gave. Dr. Kofi Boa, founder of the Center for No-Till Agriculture (CNTA) in Ghana, has spent decades proving they can give again.

Boa traces his journey from a burned family farm to one of Africa’s most compelling soil restoration demonstration models and makes the case for a distinctly African approach to regeneration: grounded in what fallow land has always shown us, driven by farmers who need a full granary before they need a carbon credit, and proven through evidence you can walk through and see for yourself.

From community-led adoption to the tension between carbon credit schemes and food security, this is a grounded, honest account of what building a regenerative agriculture movement looks like from the inside, in the soil, with the farmers, over decades.

Emmanuel Luwemba – The decentralised business disrupting the seed monopolies in East Africa

27th March 2026 antonellatotaro African Regenerative Frontrunners, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

Seeds, seeds, seeds. It all starts with power and who controls the seeds. But who is actually building scalable companies in this space? Today we have one: a decentralised seed company in Uganda that only works with indigenous seeds, is farmer-owned, and gives power, value, and control back to the farmers. The farmers are trained to select seeds and to grow them, and Emmanuel Luwemba, the founder of Eden Seeds, helps sell the best varieties to other farmers without extracting all life from the countryside like most seed companies do.

What about yields? Emmanuel went deep into what farmers actually need. Of course, yield is important, but so is profitability. Dirty little secret: hybrid seeds are often very expensive and need a lot of very expensive inputs to perform. They often don’t perform in challenging circumstances (droughts, extreme weather, etc). Taste, flavour, and nutrition are important too. Indigenous seeds are naturally high in iron, for example and there’s no need for a multimillion-dollar, donor-funded GMO or CRISPR project to change hybrid seeds to add extra iron. Just breed, grow, and eat the indigenous variety selected over time for iron. That’s not to say we can’t develop these seeds further or that they are frozen in time, of course we can and should. If indigenous seeds got a quarter of the funding hybrids get, they would outperform everyone.

Olusola Sowemimo – How a Nigerian lawyer built a profitable organic farm with standards, data and community

13th March 2026 antonellatotaro African Regenerative Frontrunners, Diet Change, Regenerative Agriculture, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

A mother’s passing set off a mission: rebuild trust in food by rebuilding the way it’s grown. We sit down with Olusola Sowemimo, a lawyer-turned-farmer and founder of Ope Farms in Nigeria, to unpack how grief became a blueprint for organic, traceable, and profitable agriculture. Her catalyst was a cancer conference in California where survivors only ate what they could trace—an idea that reshaped how she thinks about soil, inputs, and integrity. Back home, the early days were rough: antibiotic-laced manure wiped out hundreds of tomato plants, a strong tobacco extract burned cucumbers, and buyers were nowhere in sight. What changed? Relentless record keeping, strict organic standards, and smart design—corner plots with buffer zones, on-farm worker housing, and a refusal to cut down trees.

Olusola details how rabbits and carefully managed poultry helped her close nutrient loops, why fruit trees are the most underrated cash-flow asset for new organic farms, and how processing gluts into shelf-stable products saved revenue. She shares the playbook for market fit—from salad staples to premium greens like kale—and the power of traceability in winning home deliveries, retail partners, and even international lab validations for turmeric and ginger. We also explore the human side: training that prevents avoidable mistakes, social media that tells an honest story, and the mindset shift needed to move beyond “organic is impossible”.

Ivan Mandela – Unicorns can wait, African farmers can’t

10th March 2026 antonellatotaro African Regenerative Frontrunners, Regenerative Agriculture, Transition finance 1 Comment

It’s a very interesting time for African agriculture and food, the continent is realising it’s potential to help feed the world, money is flowing into infrastructure to unlock this, more and more talent is coming into the space and the realisation that agro ecology or regenerative agriculture is no longer a nice niche with big margins but has the potential to become the predominant way of agriculture is performed. 

After putting over $ 20 million to work in East Africa, Ivan Mandela, founder of SHONA Group, has learned the hard way: chasing Western style so called unicorns might not be the right approach for a predominantly agricultural society. So he shifted his approach and started investing in real companies, to help create a functioning main street a functional real economy where unicorns will naturally start to occur. We discuss why Ivan ends up mostly backing female entrepreneurs, his tips for young students and his takes on nutrient density and quality.

Ivan Mandela is co-founder of Shona capital, which provides East Africa’s SMEs with flexible debt to help them grow and achieve their full potential, and co-founder of Rootical, a start-up studio enabling purpose-driven entrepreneurs in Uganda to build and own their regenerative agri- food companies.

Million Belay – Why the USAID shutdown was a gift to agroecology in Africa

3rd February 2026 antonellatotaro African Regenerative Frontrunners, Regenerative Agriculture 6 Comments

The difference between agroecology and regenerative agriculture is the deep social change we need in the food and agriculture system. As Laura Ortiz Montemayor told us once “ecology without social justice is just gardening”. Million Belay, who leads the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, the largest social movement on the African continent, is very clear stop intervening with agriculture on the continent, stop imposing all kinds of rules, practices, seeds, inputs etc, which don’t serve in this context (and we could argue in the context we come from as well, how many European banned pesticides are exported to the continent?)

We talk about the shut down of the USAID which was actually a good shock to the system. And finally donors, which unfortunately dictate quite a bit the direction, are talking and slowly also acting around agroecology. We discuss how through lobbying they managed to get many countries to adopt agroecology policies in the last few years, what Million would do with a billion dollar and what his message for investors is.

Omoke Brian – Inside Africa’s regenerative agriculture opportunity

13th January 2026 antonellatotaro African Regenerative Frontrunners, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

Bill Gates Foundation works in Africa: what goes through your mind when you hear those words? We all probably quickly have our thoughts ready, but hold on a second. Just as we often talk about farmers without asking them, we often talk about the African continent without asking people actually living there. So, we never fully grasp how big, how interesting, how full of potential, and how fundamental it is in a regenerative future.

In this new series on African Regenerative Frontrunners, we try to do that differently. We will be talking to amazing regenerative entrepreneurs on the continent, but we obviously are not the best suited to do that and thus won’t be doing this alone. We are collaborating and co-hosting this series with Omoke Brian, aka The Organic Guy, who has been deep in organic agroecology for the last 10 years, based in Kenya, an entrepreneur himself and a podcast host. We will be co-hosting a number of conversations. We will both interview different guests and build upon each other’s episodes, and we kick it off with a double interview where I join Omoke’s show and he joins ours. Will we get it perfect? No. Will we have a lot of fun doing it? Yes.

Why the continent? Most young people this century will be born there. Most land is farmed by smallholders who barely make ends meet. And it is hit hard- really hard- by climate change while having contributed nearly nothing to it. So, all of us better get to work.

What are the big myths, the big pitfalls, when foreigners- especially investors and entrepreneurs- come to this continent and try to “help the poor farmers”? Yes, we will be talking about Gates, GMOs, decolonisation and all the good stuff, and of course get into what Brian sees as big opportunities and what he would do if he were investing 1B, and of course the magic wand question.