Kwami Williams: Cultivating Community Wealth

INKOnversation S02 Ep.12! 

Join Kwami Williams , CEO and co-founder of @truemoringa , as he shares his journey from aerospace to agriculture, and how he’s cultivating community wealth through sustainable farming practices.

Transcript

Cony 

Hello, welcome to our show. My name is Constance Uwase. I am a business development advisor at INKOMOKO. I am super excited to have you Kwami with us today. 
would you please introduce yourself? 

Kwami 

Hi, Constance. Thank you. And the team for this chance to share our story and journey. My name is Kwami Williams. I serve as the co-founder and CEO of True Moringa and we are a social enterprise working in Ghana on a mission to move farmers from poverty to middle income. 

Cony 
You have an amazing journey from aerospace to agriculture. Take us back to the moment you decided to shift from putting people on the moon and empowering others to put food on the table. 

Kwami 

Well, first and foremost, thank you so much for this opportunity, Constance. And you're on your entire team super excited to share a little bit about our story and journey.  Just for context for everyone, True Moringa is a social enterprise operating in Ghana on a mission to move farmers from poverty to middle income. And we have a big audacious goal that by 2034, we want to have moved 20,000 farmers out of poverty and food insecurity and as well sequester over 200,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases fighting climate change. And so that's that's a quick context and background, high level overview of True Moringa. 

And you're right, my journey did not start at all in agriculture. It started in aerospace engineering. I was born in Ghana, immigrated to the United States when I was in the fourth grade. And got the chance to pursue robotics in high school and by university, I was studying aerospace engineering at MIT. That was my dream and like Mommy, Mommy, I wanna be a rocket scientist. And MIT has the best aerospace engineering program. And I got the chance to do that. I also got the chance to intern at NASA, which was also my dream career. I worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Kennedy Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Flight Center. So in my mind, you know, here's this immigrant kid from Ghana thinking this is my dream. This is everything I've ever wanted to do.

And in my… after my second year at university, a mentor says alright Kwami, Listen, it's been 10 years since you left Ghana. You haven't been back home to Ghana since you left. So I wanna challenge you that instead of going back to intern at NASA for this summer holiday break, I want you to actually go back to Ghana and try to do some type of good in the country. Don't just go and give hugs and kisses to your aunties and uncles. And so quite reluctantly, I must say, I joined a student trip being run by a Christian student group at MIT that said let's go and serve in hospitals and orphanages in Ghana. And that trip changed everything for me. That really began this shift from aerospace to agriculture because I saw rural poverty up close and personal. I was living with and sharing life with people who were surviving on one meal a day. And by the end of that trip, I just realised I've been blessed with so much. And everything I was studying just seemed so far away at the time from solving the the the real, tangible challenges of people I got to share life with. 

And so my last two years at MIT, I sort of dedicated to exploring what's the way to International Development? And I was super, super fortunate to find a program at MIT called D Lab, which says no matter what you're studying, let's all come together and Co create solutions with people in the development world and to solve the biggest challenges. And so I took that class that went through that program and that's what gave me the fundamental tools to think about agriculture as a tool to lift people out of poverty. Realize that so much of Ghanaians are farmers. And agriculture is the most powerful way, in my humble opinion, to really lift up the Ghana's population out of poverty. 

Cony 

Thank you. Kwami. Was there any kind of pushback from family? I mean, for every African parent they... in aerospace. Being in space is like dream.  

Kwami 

Yeah. So they kind. Of course yes there was some… I like to say some caution. Some strong caution. You know I like to... when I reflect back, I think back to the very moment I told my mom that, you know, Mommy, I've had this incredible time in Ghana seeing, you know, poverty up close and personal. I believe that there is a way, you know, if aerospace engineers can put a man on the moon, then we can also find tangible ways to help create more opportunities for people and help put more food on the table for families. And I said, I think I after graduating I want to move back to Ghana and she actually just she cried. She broke down and cried on the phone, and she was just… coming to the US, she was working multiple jobs. Both my parents had to work multiple jobs as immigrants in the US. Because the US Unfortunately did not accept their decades plus years of experience for my mom in banking and for my dad and telecommunications and wanted them to basically start their careers over. And so they went back to school, took two, sometimes three jobs just to care for my brother and myself and be able to send money back home. And so to come home. And it's like 11:30 PM. She's come home. She's hearing her son, who's about to graduate from MIT with an aerospace engineering degree say, I wanna go back to Ghana and I want to go help farmers. She didn't even have words, she just broke down. 

But what's so beautiful about that story is that at first, you know, she tried. She called all the aunties and uncles called upon me, tried to convince not to do this. After they failed, she roused that I told her. Listen, I care about people this deeply, because I've seen you and my dad. You and Daddy love sacrificially. So many people who are not your kids, who we have no relation to. And once I set those words, it really clicked for her that she and my dad made me the way I am. And so she flipped the switch. She said “Alright, Kwami, what do you need? How can we be helpful?” And you know they actually, when I moved to Ghana, they gave me our... their property that was here. I gutted it out. I turned the garage into our first factory. And we're staying next door in the next room. And I like to joke my mom is my unofficial CFO. You know, every time I call there, she checks up on me, the family and she says, OK, what about this thing in the business? And this thing in the business? Her the banking brain never quite retired. And so, my parents have been just... yeah, and my brother, have just been incredible support. And now my wife has been added to that community of support around me that has encouraged me. Even though I left the security of aerospace engineering and also really, I've been in the American dream that they had dreamed up for me. 

Cony 

I know. Kwami, starting a business is tough, especially in agriculture with a focus on sustainability and social impact. How did those values shape your business in the beginning and how do you do they influence your decisions today? 

Kwami 

Yeah. Starting a business in Africa is absolutely tough. I think, unfortunately, yeah, whether it's in Ghana or other parts of the world, so much of the ecosystem does more to hinder you than help you. And I think your question on, you know how to be sort of anchor in values is absolutely essential. For us, it started with how we even created True Moringa in the 1st place. A core value of our business is just listening and learning from the people that we are working with and designing with rather than trying to create a solution and kind of slap it down or push it onto others. And so, you know, we met farmers specifically, cultivating a tree called moringa. And they were saying, oh, this is an incredible miracle dream. And i say, OK, slow down on the whole miracle talk. Let's let's look into the science and let's look into the market. And when I looked into the science, I realised, wow, they were so right. The leaves of the tree contained more iron than spinach, calcium than milk, Protein than yogurt. And when my Co founder Emily looked into the market, she was like, there was a $5 billion global market for moringa and superfoods like it that was growing year over year. And so we kind of went back to the farmers, and I was like, OK, I was wrong. It is a miracle tree. How can we help? And they all fundamentally shared well Well, can you help us make money from Moringa? 

So I'd like to joke that our goal in life is to prove that my mom was wrong about one thing in life which is, money does grow on trees. That they grow on moring trees and increasingly they grow on all these amazing super foods. So I think our business started from this place of let's listen to the farmers and let's understand what they want. I'll say, OK, I'm an engineer. I'm gonna build some machines that can process moringa. And so we built the first set of machines and we showed the farmers. And farmers told us, no, actually, I don't want your machine. What I want you to do is give me a market for moringa. I wanna become a better farmer of moringa. Instead of five trees in my backyard. I wanna plant 500 trees on an acre and make meaningful money that moves me out of poverty. And so again, this sort of value of listening and partnering with people rather than dictating and imposing is core to our business. And then as a company as our companies has evolved in the past 10 years, we have 4 core pillars, pillar value. So passion, integrity excellence and consistency. And those are the four things that we try to anchor ourselves and our decision-making on towards our mission to move farmers out of poverty and middle income. So we found these four values as things that we're imperfect at but want to pursue every single day and get better at. 

Cony 

That's great. Inkomoko's vision in Africa, is thriving communities where young people and refugees are engaged. Communities have access to relevant innovation for self-determination and where African solutions are unleashed to solve African problems. You talked about empowering smallholder farmers. Can you share some examples of how True Moringa works with these farmers and the impact it has on their lives and the communities? 

Kwami 

Absolutely. I love Inkomoko's vision and I think there are so many synergies with what we do at True Moringa. And we specifically partner with farmers in four ways. So the first core pillar is we helped unbanked farmers save, invest and build credit through something called Village Savings and loans associations VSLAs. So we have an app that tracks all of their savings and investing. And basically our goal is, let's improve the financial literacy of rural farmers. 

And then the second core pillar is farming. We approach farming communities and our goal here is to say how do we partner with you to transform your unproductive, you know, non forest land into a flourishing farm. And the way we do this is We demarcate parts of tracts of land, we protect it from extractive industries, And then we get it organically certified for Europe and US and Asia, so they can capture high premiums from the produce that's grown on the land. We integrate solar irrigation, we provide them the organic seeds and inputs. So that we go from a line that is unproductive to now a line that's creating jobs in our community that's cultivating food for consumption. That's also creating high value, high value tree crops that can generate high income both short mid term and in the long term for our farmers. And these trees are also sequestering carbon, which is an amazing way to kind of tie it all together. So we're doing things that are good for people and good for planet. 

And then the third pillar is factory is agro processing and manufacturing. So much of what we produce here on the continent unfortunately gets exported without any value addition. You know Ghana, West Africa makes 70% of the cocoa beans, for example. That goes in all the chocolate we love and eat around the world, yet we capture less than 7% of the global value of the chocolate industry. And that's simply because we don't add a ton of value. We just send the raw cocoa beans. And so we made an intentional decision that we will process, we'll do the majority of our processing right here in Ghana. That way we can create jobs along the value chain, and we can capture more of the market to support and reinvest here in Ghana. And so it's been really cool to create now 80 plus jobs along our supply chain by being intentional in agro processing here in Ghana. 

And the fourth pillar is it's market. As I shared earlier, how do we connect what we cultivate here to market and make this entire chain sustainable. And so we sell what we what's made in Ghana was grown in Ghana, made in Ghana should also be enjoyed in Ghana. And so we ensure that our products are enjoyed here. And then we also export products to partner retailers in the US like Whole Foods Market. We also sell in partnership on Costco's e-commerce platform Macy's e-commerce platform, Amazon and our own True Moringa website. 

Cony 

It's so cool. Entrepreneurship often means taking a risk. Yeah. And these things really go hand in hand. And can you tell us about a time you had to take a big leap of faith in your journey and what did you learn from that experience? 

Kwami 

I think to me the biggest one actually came out of a crisis. In 2019 January 1st of 2019, I woke up to a call from our largest farm and our farm manager saying, hey, well, Bush fire, you know, a wildfire has jumped over our Fire Protection belt and burned up all of our organic certified trees. So it was like over 200,000 trees. It just burned down to ashes. And then four months later, unfortunately, a malfunction in a dryer we use in our processing led to a fire which also burned down our entire factory, and it was just two, back-to-back, devastating blows 4 months apart. Just about a week before, about 10 days before our fire, we had received a large investment to help finance what would have been over $1,000,000 worth of products sold and exported to a number of core key customers. And so it just felt like our entire world was crashing down. 

And you know the big question was do we... do we just say, OK, well, we have every reason to shut the business down. In fact, I had some investors come to me and say, well, I don't, I don't think you guys can make it out of this. So just you know, return the money that you still have left, just call it quits and know that you've tried. You know you tried to do something, it didn't work. And we had to take a leap of faith to say no. We're we're not going to give up this. These fires are not going to be the end of our business. And that we're going to use it, I see actually as an opportunity, right. And so we made that choice that we would use this as a Crucible moment and come out refined, stronger, better. And what... in terms of what it taught me, you know, first I had to learn how to self-care as a leader. It's something that just sort of put on the back burner and in that season I just realised no, I'm not invincible. And I really doubled down on my personal faith in God as a Christian I found daily rhythms of reading, of exercising, of praying, even of dancing. I carved out time, protected time with loved ones. Particularly just my wife and just being able to create new rhythms where I really value the people that I was doing life with. It also as I said helped me build better disciplines to self-care. And then from that place of being in a better place I was able to truly lead through resilience and crisis. 

So our entire team rallied around us, our entire community of investors of customers rallied around us. We did have some investors who stopped investing in us and supporting us, but we also saw we're also pleasantly surprised by people who just stepped up in the most amazing ways. Someone created a go fund me for us. Umm, some people gave us uh significant grants and donations. Other lenders we had changed their lending terms to allow us to have more time to rebuild before paying back their debt. I mean, it was just a beautiful opportunity to say I don't have everything figured out, but what I do know is that I want to keep going. 

Cony 

It's so empowering. You mentioned a lot of self-care. As a founder, how important do you think leadership and values are for business success? How do you create a strong, driven culture at True Moringa? 

Kwami 

Yeah, it is hard but absolutely necessary to cultivate a strong value driven culture within your organization. For us at True Moringa, we realized that it really comes down to all our senior leaders, so my co-founder, myself, the directors and the organization. Really modeling the right rhythms, which sets the tone for the rest of the organization. 

So first I say it, it comes down to modeling it. And then the second piece is really creating some specific systems to reward values when they're being lived out well, and then to reprimand where behavior is not in line with values. And that last part, the reprimanding part, is the part that I think I actually struggled the most with throughout our journey. But I've realized, especially post our fire and the chance to do everything over again and to do it better. That's just how extremely important it is. And so just to talk more practically for us. 

We have, you know talked through our four values all the time. Passion, integrity, excellent consistency as an organization we give shout-outs and slack in weekly meetings to people as they live that out. And we say, “yeah, I want to shout out to, so and so for living out our values of integrity. Here's how she did it, right?” We also at the end of every month have employee of the team and departments and month awards and leader of the Month awards where we also again reward value. So as a financial reward, there's also the reward of just being acknowledged and affirmed publicly to the whole organization. 

And then we also have built in now on the reprimanding and rewarding side of things performance structure. That every quarter we're running performance reviews, assessing how people are living up to our values and people are able to you know, get promoted get increases in their salary, all through living our values. And for people who are underperforming to make it very clear, transparent and objective, the path they need to take to improve their performance. And if someone is unable to do that or unwilling to do that, there's a clear path and defined process as well for us to terminate that person. 

So we are ensuring that we're preserving the right culture in the organization. And for anyone out there who perhaps just struggles like me when it comes to firing people or terminating people, just some quick points of advice. Because I really struggled in this way and I think actually failed the organization this way in its early years. We... the most loving thing you can do to someone who's underperforming and the most loving thing you can do to those who are performing your A players is to ensure that people who are underperforming first know that they underperforming so that it's never a surprise. Two, are given the chance to improve. Three are equipped with the resources and the support needed to improve. And four, if that doesn't change to know that the most loving thing is to say this is not the best place for you, let me support you to find a different place. Write letters of referrals and recommendations that are honest and true that can lead them to other pathways. But that way you're preserving the culture. 

Cony 

You mentioned culture shoutouts at Inkomoko, we are big fans of culture shoutouts. We have a specific channel for culture shoutouts on slack and where instead of waiting for long to give a shout-outs we would say to give people their flowers.

We love it. It keeps it very fun. And I mean healthy as well. And you feel recognized too when you get your shout out. I'm so glad that you apply that with True Moringa.  So kwami, True Moringa has grown a lot since you started. What are the key milestones that you really are proud of? 

Kwami 

It's been quite a journey over the past 10 years. And, you know, having to reinvent ourselves after fires and COVID and everything that happened in the world between 2019 and 2021. I think the things that I'm most proud of right now, are: 

We supported 6500 farmers to plant moringa. We've planted 3 million trees. We've throughout VSLA model. This is one of the things that I'm most proud of. We've we've helped over 3000 of our farmers save and invest over $750,000 just since 2019 when we piloted our VSLA program. And this statistic is just wild to me because these are all unbanked farmers. Like farmers, that the the the formal banking sector neglects, and yet they have and have put to work $750,000. 

Well, I'm also really proud of the fact that we made a really tough decision coming out of our crises and resilience to just reinvent our farmer engagement model. And hyper focus on what we call our community model, our Community farm model. This is where we partner with the Community and build out large tracts of land and then invite, specifically landless farmers, vulnerable populations, women, tribal minorities, onto the farm, giving them access to land for tree crop farming for the first time in their lives. And the thing that gets me excited about this sort of refined model is that 70% of our farmers are now women. And they're on a path where they're all making about $1000 per acre per year, and that's really basically the threshold of middle income in Ghana. Start earning about $1000 or more each year. 

And so it's just been so cool. It took us 10 years to keep tweaking things, listening to farmers. To make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. But to get to this point where I can finally sort of see, and I can taste that there is a path to get farmers to, to middle income. It just feels really good. 

Cony 

I work closely with young entrepreneurs at all stages. Idea stage, start or build in different sectors and you know how one of the biggest hassles or challenges are usually access to finance, access to market. You mentioned how you got into the European market and how you're satisfying the Ghanaian market. All those are things that usually young entrepreneurs are always like puzzled about and they just don't know how to start. Especially you don't have collaterals to go to the banks or all these challenges that startups face. Looking back on your journey, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs that are just starting? 

Kwami 

The key things I should say that I wish I had done better throughout our journey we're one, not falling in love with my solution. I once heard a phrase “To marry the problem but date the plan” Right? So the exact plan of how you're going to solve the problem, you know it's gonna change. But just to be completely, madly hyper focused on what is the true problem that you're solving. The more you do that I think the better the plan becomes and the more clarity you have on exact steps you need to take and also the resources that people you need to bring on board to solve the problem. A powerful tool that helps encourage hyper focused on. Problem is the idea of the lean business model so that the principles of build something, measure it, learn from it, and then repeat, so build, measure, learn that loop. I think it's really powerful because you can build something, test it with customers. See, does it really create the impact you need? Measure the results so that it's not up to your feelings right. Another big thing that I think a lot of entrepreneurs face when they're starting out is to think is think they need all the money to build the factory first, right? They need all the money to make the first product and the build, measure, learned loop I think helps you. Because a core principle that you can pair with that is what is the minimum viable version of this thing, what is the minimum. Viable products and. That, that phrase is just saying what is the smallest version of your idea that you can make? That will help you learn whether or not it's working. 

Cony 

So basically, you don't need to start with the most funds and the fanciest thing and just need to start and stick to using what you have. 

Kwami 

You don't need the most beautiful version, you just need The minimum viable version. 

Cony 

So finally, what's next for True moringa? 

Kwami 

True moringa is at an inflection point. We just celebrated 10 years. And so we like we're thinking about, you know, the next 10 years. And that's where our our 2034 vision really comes in. We want by that time to have moved 20,000 farmers out of poverty and food insecurity, and that tangibly means, you know, we, we want each of those farmers earning a minimum of $1000 per acre per year. So farmers, you know who as they scale to more acres would be earning even more than that. And that's really the minimum threshold that we wanna get all of our farmers to. Additionally, so much of our work is at an intersection between climate change and and and livelihoods. Right. And so. All the trees that we're planting are are are 2034 goals that they would have sequestered over 200,000 metric tons worth of of greenhouse gases. 

Cony 

Thank you so much. Coming. It was such a pleasure to have you here. 

Kwami 

Thank you. Really appreciate the opportunity. Really appreciate it.