Sometimes it's really nice to tell a story, a farm to fork story and a success
story and now we're all happy and it's all win-win and that's not how it works.
It has been tough.
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My name is Faraz Ramji.
The company is Norda Industries.
And based here in Kenya.
My parents are both from East Africa.
So my dad is born in Uganda.
My mom is actually born in Congo.
I don't know if any of you have heard about Idi Amin,
he was a dictator in Uganda, and he didn't like Asians.
His solution was, kick out all the Asians.
So, basically exiled, and
you had something like 30 days to get out, with one suitcase.
And so my dad ended up fleeing to the UK.
And my mom, who was studying in Rwanda at the time,
was sent to the UK to study English.
So they met in the UK, I was born in the UK.
I would come to East Africa frequently, I loved it.
When I come to Africa I just felt so free, and I loved that freedom, and
I love the emotional intelligence of the people.
I end up studying development in London.
As soon as I finished university I came to Rwanda.
He was looking for jobs and my grandfather was looking kind of from a distance.
And he said let's start a business together.
We make snack foods, we make potato chips, corn snacks and corn puffs.
Potatoes are very interesting.
When I started the business I really focused them on coming up with
really snazzy packaging.
And I was like wait, can I get the product inside be of that quality as well.
And so I went looking for potatoes and they'd bring the potatoes one day, and
we'd slice them and fry them and they'd be okay.
And the next day they'd be brown and the next day they'd be green and
the next day they'd be something else and I just couldn't get it.
So finally, I went online to good old Google and I typed in potato supply Kenya.
Ingenious, and I came across a group of farmers in an area
called Bomet in Kenya and they had actually been trained in
how to farm specific varieties of potatoes for crisps.
Different varieties are better for different processes.
For crisps you need a variety which has a high dry matter,
which basically means low moisture content.
You also need it to have a low sugar content because otherwise you get
those brown rings.
You actually don't want that.
We actually found a Dutch variety which worked very well here in Kenya from these
cooperatives.
This is how disconnected we sometimes all are.
So, in the NGO world they're doing this work to train farmers on how to grow
potatoes for crisps but at the same time they hadn't gone and found the market.
And so, when I called them up, they were thrilled, they were in my office the next
day with samples, and we tried them out and they were really good,
because of course they'd followed best farming practice, etc.
The next weekend we went to Bomet and
it was really interesting because these are all smallholder farmers.
They own typically one or two acres of land and they struggle with their daily
livelihoods because they've been dependent on middle men who
essentially fleece them and tell them, okay, your potatoes are going to rot.
This is our price.
They get desperate.
We sat down in their school hall, which is basically a mud hut.
I remember these 20 or 30 farmers and they were happy.
They were delighted.
And that's how it started.
The farmers tell us that they're putting their kids through school and
university because of our contracts.
We see them grow.
We see them able to expand their farms and, I think,
the profound impact to their livelihoods.
>> Norda has changed me personally, my family too, and my community.
Now my community, they are sure when they are planting potatoes,
they have the market for their potatoes.
>> Some of the big commodity companies here,
they did not want to touch our products.
So, we worked with much smaller distributors.
They have expanded their facilities,
they have invested in warehousing, they have invested in trucks,
they've helped them with training and they themselves are then impacting other lives.
>> Our business, now, it's expanding because initially
when we started we had one store, right now we have two stores.
>> We started with one employee and right now we have nine employees.
>> My uncle joined the business about a year and a half ago.
We had all these ambitious growth plans and then six months into him joining I get
a call in the middle of the night and it's my sales manager.
I say to him, is everything okay?
He says no, the factory's on fire.
So, in a rush to the factory and there's this eerie feeling as you're approaching
there's a smoke and there's a fire engines and there's a police.
They battle the fire till 8 AM, and everything was decimated,
from the machines to the stock, everything.
Fire had finished.
Fire services people had left, the police had left, the insurance had left and
I'm about to add to my car myself, and
it's about 5 PM exhausted, hadn't slept the whole night before.
And I see one of my farmers walk up, and I said him, what are you doing here?
He says I heard, the moment I heard I got in the car and
came down here to grieve with you.
And it was so touching because of course, it was a loss for them too.
>> I wanted to be with them,
mourn with them, because it was a hard moment for all of us.
>> That was, I don't know what you call it, defining moment.
They say these things build character.
[LAUGH] I don't know.
Probably the reason we're still standing today is because of the experience
of Seed.
You're running your business day-to-day and you're seeing it like this,
with blinkers on.
And then wake up, Seed, you have Seed, and suddenly you start thinking bigger,
you start thinking laterally and dynamically.
Stanford Seed teaches you to think like [SOUND], like that.
It's shifted our outlook, our ambition, our values.
So I see that the sky's the limit.
My passion was development and helping people to grow and uplifting and
creating impact in this part of the world.
We started this business purely for profit, but
we've ended up I think right back to where I started.
In development, I believe we each have our unique preed of impact.
I believe that each of us, deep down we want to serve humanity,
we want to make make the world a better place.
We want to know that our life mattered.
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