Sunflower oil entrepreneur Brigitha Faustin is helping push African agribusiness to the next level. Growing up, Brigitha Faustin, 32, often visited her grandparents in their village home in the lush, hilly landscape near Mount Kilimanjaro. In her own middle-class home in Moshi town, they prepared their meals with sunflower oil, but in the village, Faustin saw little sign of the thick, yellow liquid. Experiencing poverty in the village planted a sense of social justice in Faustin. Years later, she has built a business on sourcing sunflower seeds from 1,200 smallholder farmers — 90 percent of whom are women — to produce affordable cooking oil for Tanzanian families. By cutting off the middlemen, she can pay the farmers four times the usual price of seeds and still compete with the prices for locally produced pure sunflower oil. |