Line of Sight Podcast · Don Heider PhD, Brigit Helms PhD

Partnering with Smallholder Farmers to Bring Products to Market with Florence Mogere

·34 min·2 clips

Florence says one rural farmer expanded into poultry, dairy cows, goats, eggs, and a washing machine.

1. Line of Sight Podcast, through the Founders of Impact series, features Florence Mogere and Nyota’s work with smallholder farmers in Kenya. 2. Karen Rendy hosts the conversation as Senior Director of Alumni Programs and Academics at Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, and Florence Mogere speaks as founder of MIOTA/Nyota. 3. The episode asks how a Kenyan food enterprise can build markets for rural farmers, employ women, and scale frozen vegetables and tomato sauces. 4. Karen says the team visited Florence in Nairobi, Kenya, during Miller Center’s annual Africa immersion trip after starting in Rwanda. 5. Florence connects the Kenya protests and cost-of-living pressure to the value of social enterprises that create jobs and income-generating opportunities. 6. She describes Nyota as a social enterprise that partners with smallholder farmers across rural Kenya and buys fresh vegetables for production lines. 7. Nyota’s products include frozen vegetables and canned specialty tomato sauces sold mainly through supermarket chains to middle-income urban consumers in Kenya. 8. Florence says the company works with slightly over 500 farmers, about 85% of them women, and employs about 40 people at the production facility. 9. She explains that the supply chain depends on cold-chain infrastructure, flash freezing, and farmers who can be as far as 500 kilometers from the facility. 10. Florence says the company built its farmer network village by village, usually starting with 20 to 30 farmers growing one product in a rural area. 11. She says her finance background, with an MBA in finance and a CPA, was far from food production and required learning from YouTube, Google, and friends. 12. Nyota began in 2019 with two nannies from Florence’s kitchen and later expanded when one asked to include women from the neighborhood. 13. Florence says the original goal was to keep those women employed while finding convenient, nutritious meals for a working mother with young children. 14. She says the company chose African indigenous vegetables and started production and packaging in her house before moving into retail. 15. Florence says customers later told her the products transformed family life by cutting meal preparation time by 95%. 16. She says the business has scaled organically from customer to customer and has posted 2.5x growth in the last year. 17. Florence describes the Miller Center accelerator as intense, saying it needs commitment from “your soul, mind and belly.” 18. She says the program helped her rethink business model, unit economics, funding options, and leadership, especially with mentors Alex Limberis and Jose Flajo. 19. Listeners interested in women-led agribusiness, social entrepreneurship, and Kenya’s farmer economy will get the most from this conversation. 20. Listeners wanting abstract startup theory without farmer-to-market detail may skip it.

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