Social Entrepreneur: Conscious Companies | Benefit Corporations | Impact Investing

Yvette Ondachi uses technology to connect smallholder farmers to markets. Yvette Ondachi is a biochemist. She was a pharmaceutical product manager across several east African countries. “The problem I encountered was, most people couldn’t afford [medicine],” Yvette told me. Even after an experiment in which the company lowered the cost of medications by 75%, many people still could not get access to medicine. “One of the things that propelled me,” Yvette explained, “was watching mothers, helpless as their children suffered from preventable diseases.” She knew she had to do something to make a difference. “Something within me became very restless. I said, ‘I have to do something about this.’” Most of the people who were unable to buy medicine were smallholder farmers, those who farm on small plots of land and live off of their crops. Globally, there are about 500 million smallholder farmers. They produce 80% of the food consumed in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In Kenya, around 42 million people work at least