In 2008, I quit my job and moved from New Jersey to Nigeria to work for the Clinton Health Access Initiative.  On one of many road trips in northern Nigeria, I looked up and noticed that almost everything outside the car was covered in tomatoes. It seemed obvious to me that the region would benefit from some kind of tomato processing factory to take all that fruit and convert it into a more shelf-stable product, like canned tomatoes or tomato paste. And so, a dream was born.

So I set a goal for myself: from January through June 2014, I would try to determine whether it was economically, operationally, and politically viable to launch a tomato processing business in Nigeria. If the answer was yes, I’d go ahead and launch a company. If the answer was no, I’d start recruiting for jobs again after graduation.

Although the market for both tomatoes and tomato paste is huge in Nigeria, no company seemed to be able to consistently capitalize on the opportunity.  And if I were able to commercially grow tomatoes and teach smallholder farmers how to grow tomatoes at the right cost per ton, and then schedule this tomato production so that a consistent volume of fruit could be harvested over a defined period of time, then it stood to reason that I would be able to make paste.

Four years later, Tomato Jos has made significant progress: we have doubled our yields every year and brought our cost per ton down to the range where processing can be profitable. As we look ahead to the next season, our goal is to scale the farming side of the business to the point where we can invest in our own factory and finally launch the brand.

Read the full article about social enterprise in Nigeria by Mira Mehta at hbs.edu.