Quote of the Day

“What gives me the most satisfaction is that I enjoy what I do, I learn every day, I challenge myself to improve.”

Sara Bouazza is the founder of the SOSdigital, a startup in Morocco. She offers web services for small businesses in the process of digitization. She also offers her virtual digital platforms to customers to showcase their products and allow them permanent visibility 24/7. Sara wants to develop SOSdigital to make a significant turnover and empower young graduates in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

More about Sara →

Lioness Weekender spoke to the impact driven founder of AMAATI to find out more about her unique entrepreneurial journey and her vision for the future of the business.

What does your company do?

AMAATI is using a market led approach to revive Fonio on community degraded lands. We support landless vulnerable women in rural savannah to grow Fonio on community abandoned lands which are degraded by providing farming support services. Fonio is drought resistant, matures in eight weeks (compared to 16 weeks for maize, rice) and harvested twice in a season, grows on marginal lands, and continues cultivation for three years, regenerates the soil and women can grow Fonio and other food crops. We buy the Fonio at guaranteed market prices at farm gate. AMAATI then processes it into different product forms for local and export markets.

What inspired you to start your company?

Growing up in rural savannah I experienced first-hand the plight of women in my village and in my immediate environment (home) where women serve only as labour on men’s farms for their livelihood. The opportunity to survive throughout the year wasn’t possible with the income they received from this labor work. I thought this was just a challenge in my community, until I started working and had the opportunity to travel. I realized that most women in rural savannah had no access to fertile lands due to culture and tradition. The only available lands were degraded lands which couldn’t support food crop cultivation thereby compromising food security. Fonio was an indigenous food that had been neglected, yet it was the only crop that could grow very well on marginal lands without fertilizers. To reduce the plight of women in our society where this phenomenon has become a tradition, we decided to support rural women to revive Fonio in the savannah region where there is vast majority of degraded lands that are abandoned.

Why should anyone use your service or product?

AMAATI is the only company in Ghana that has identified a marketable indigenous cereal that can be revived and promoted to benefit local farmers and potentially other customers. This company is located at the heart of the northern region that is most suitable for the production and scaling up of this native crop.

This innovation is special from other products because it focuses more on sustainable agriculture and livelihoods which ensures long term agricultural activities, as well as healthy agro-ecosystems with minimal inputs for crop productivity. Fonio is resilient to the impacts of climate variability because it has low water requirements and can withstand a wide range of weather conditions. As this innovation grows more farmers will diversify. Crop diversification is a key strategy for resilience to climate change.

DIM Fonio is extremely versatile and can be a substitute to most cereal grains, including rice, wheat, oats, and quinoa. Due to its rich nutritional values and unique dietary properties (gluten free and sugar free), DIM Fonio is considerably different from its competitors. This allows AMAATI to target specific categories where other products cannot address their needs. These categories are diabetics, the aged, and the obese. One of our key differentiators is the indigenous root. As Africa’s urban population is growing, people lose access to traditional indigenous ingredients such as Fonio which cannot be found in supermarkets. We provide excellent customer service, keeping close contact with our clients through social media, phone, and text messages, setting us apart from our competitors and providing us with a 70% repeat purchase rate.

Tell us a little about your team

Team AMAATI is made up of a blend of young and dynamic team members and a group of middle to older women processors who blend and work towards achieving our mission (80% women and 20% men). The team is led by myself, Salma Abdulai, as the Chief Executive Officer, and a board of five which has a membership which is  60% female.

There is a clear line of authority established and every staff member knows who is responsible for who and for what. Staff members at AMAATI are engaged on a weekly basis and everyone is on the same pedestal as to the level of the company’s achievement and a clear path designed to achieve our goals. AMAATI culture on creating impacts has been embodied by all staff and this has created an environment of working not only for salary, but satisfaction derived from touching lives.

Share a little about your entrepreneurial journey. And do you come from an entrepreneurial background?

I come from a rural background in Northern Ghana where my father was farming and my mother mostly either helped on my father’s farm or worked as labor or trading to make income to take care of the house and children. Growing up I had always been looking out for a way to reduce the suffering my mum and other women in rural savannah were going through. From university, a lecture mentioned the nutritional and economic benefits of Fonio (which was available in my village) and how it was a food secured crop and had immense environmental value. It immediately awakened my passion to explore how Fonio could alleviate the suffering of women in my area. From further research I realized it could grow on marginal soil without fertilizer application. I first set out to register an NGO to support women to cultivate Fonio on these degraded lands in their communities that are abandoned. 

The first set of women were 10 landless women who upon negotiating with the chief for two days eventually released 10 acres of the degraded land to the women to cultivate Fonio. After the farming season they harvested 1200kg of Fonio and the reality dawned on me that there was little economic value after several attempts to get a market for it. So, I decided to set up a processing unit where this raw Fonio could be processed for the market. This happened after re-registration as a social enterprise company. This is how we got started and the rest they say is history.

What are your future plans and aspirations for your company?

AMAATI is focused on becoming a key player in the global Fonio market. We are investing in our supply chain to increase our supplies by 500%, improve technology enhancement, and increase our market penetration by 70% and 30% for local and export market respectively. This will increase our smallholder base to 100,000 farmers in the next five years.

What gives you the most satisfaction being an entrepreneur?

On a visit to one of the communities to mobilize Fonio in 2018, we met a young girl in the district town who upon seeing me called my name out loud in the public and said “my mother is waiting for you to come and buy Fonio, so that she can prepare me for school. I asked the young girl which community? She said “Mongoasi”. We decided the following day to go to that community first, knowing that the young Senior High School girl’s education is dependent on the income her mother will receive from us. This is just one example of the satisfaction and motivation I derived from this innovation.

What’s the biggest piece of advice you can give to other women looking to start-up?

The time to start is now, the world is waiting for their innovations to liberate us from some of the most difficult challenges we are facing in Africa. They should believe in themselves; it will make all the difference.

To find out more about the work of Salma Abdulai and her team at AMAATI, send an email to: info@amaatigroup.com or visit the company’s website and social media platforms.

WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE

What inspired you to start your company?

A few years ago, I struggled with how to cut and sew clothes, I didn’t know where to start from or where to learn the skills I needed. So I spent years looking for a solution to this problem from different places. I ended up wasting years learning little to nothing, I wasted money and time yet with nothing to show. On different occasions I would watch videos, read books and even attend sewing group tutorials all in the hope to learn. My sewing skills, interpretation of designs or perfect finishing was nothing to write-home-about. I became so confused, worried, scared and frustrated because I knew I was losing out, I didn’t believe in myself and my skills as I couldn’t sew anything meaningful for myself, not to talk of making clothes for clients. I spent a full year learning from a so-called ‘good’ tailor. But I knew if I could get hold of these skills it would help a great deal. I knew I needed a way out very fast because it was starting to affect my self-esteem; I didn’t like the fact that I was always asking my husband for every single kobo I needed. It was really bad. I finally found a way out. Today the story is different, as I not only do I sew well fitted garments, I also now help and teach other married women who are serious and desperate about learning how to sew and use this skill to generate more money, even if they are still doing their 9-5 jobs. In the month of May 2018, I opened a Fashion Training Academy where we help people, (married women our priority) solve these problems and we have trained over 300 women (boys and girls also included for summer classes) and still counting, We understand how difficult it is not to have a skill or source of income as a married woman as we know that there are no more full-housewives. (If you are married and you depend solely on your spouse for everything you are a Fool-housewife). So, this was the motivation and the push that gave birth to Gmoty Fashion Academy. Gmoty Fashion Academy Is a community that helps women find clarity and move very fast from being a full housewife to a resourceful housewife.

Why should anyone use your service or product?

 FOR THE ACADEMY

1. Our training techniques are tested and trusted. We do not just teach fashion, we also teach the business side of fashion. This is where we bring in experts from the industry to train and educate our students on selling and branding etc. We train them and we give them their first job.

2. We pride ourselves in giving the best, we connect our students with Professional Fashion Associations, Fashion Incubation Hubs, to accelerate their fashion careers.

They don’t need to have a shop/space to start their fashion career, we have a partnership with Fashion Incubation Hub in Lagos. Even if the students do not have money to start off, they can go to the hub to produce and sell. The Hub is equipped with machines and machinist, photographers for their photo-shoot, E- commerce for their products and many more people to help their fashion career, just because they trained at GFSA. They don’t need to wait until they have shops or buy a lot of machines, because of our partnership they have access to a lot of resources at the hub and can start their fashion career without the burden of how I had to navigate mine.

3. We also teach our students how to use the latest tech tools to promote their products and services.

4. We always organize fireside chats where we bring professionals for them to answer questions on how to start, scale and build a sustainable fashion business.

5. We have a conducive training facility where we train interested individuals especially women, girls, and young adults.

FOR OUR PRODUCTION HUB

We produce high quality craft and garments. We always have the end users in mind when producing our pieces. Our products are timeless. Our hand crafted products are specially made by our best students who now work and earn from what we produce and sell. (Laptop Bags, Neck Pillows and Accessories)