In 2019 after securing a Bachelor’s degree in health and human kinetics, Ornella Bisamaza embarked on a journey to achieve her goals—to impact current and future generations through her passion for agriculture, health and women empowerment. By rolling all her passions into one, Eat Green Trading and Delivery Co, was launched. The 23-year-old says, “I have always loved working in the health sector and empowering women. I wanted to be a source of opportunity to others, my mission is to transform people’s lives through health and creating opportunities specifically for women.” Eat Green is a bridge between local farmers and its customers. The business model encompasses business to business (B2B) sales and business to customer (B2C) online shopping for home deliveries, where 80 per cent of its workforce are women. Ornella Bisamaza. It deals mainly with fruits, vegetables and meat trading with local farmers. The company provides daily meals’ advocacy that generates significant strategies to combat preventable chronic diseases, such as diabetes, kidney malfunction, and heart disease, through nutritional prevention methods. According to Bisamaza, her supply chain guarantees fresh, healthy and organic produce as they are able to track their farmers from seed sowing to the harvesting stage. Some of the women Ornella Bisamaza works with. /Photos: Courtesy “Eat Green is reputable for being affordable to households and businesses while preserving its reliability as the core value for business. I continuously bid to empower women and the Rwandan youth in general,” she notes. This, she says, is portrayed by her ability to translate her connections into opportunities where women and young Rwandans can develop different skills and eventually run their own farms and businesses. The most interesting and outstanding part about the business is that as a health enthusiast, she understands the need to preserve better/improved health standards in a 360 degree approach. Aside from nutrition advocacy and pesticide-free farming, Bisamaza has chosen to align herself with Rwanda’s vision of being a green nation through using green transport to deliver her produce to customers across the country. Triumphs and future plans Through the company, Bisamaza has successfully managed to increase local farmers’ revenues on her team by at least 30 per cent while expanding her knowledge in the agricultural sector through trading, and partnership with local farmers from seed-sowing till harvesting stages. “Using my cognitive skills of farming produce and health advocacy, I am able to transcend my lifelong goals of changing people’s health standards through agriculture,” she says. Her focus now is to inspire more women to join the agricultural field, and to take more risks in building themselves up from the ground. Also, she aspires to help them understand that just because a field is dominated by men, it shouldn’t limit them from pursuing their goals and aspirations. “I want to impact young female entrepreneurs by making them understand that we should work not only to generate income, but also, to make an impact in the world/society, and most importantly, to put Rwanda on the map,” she adds. So far, the company has eight staff members of which six of them are on a permanent basis.
