International Women’s Day: How Mary Ngugi is Turning Underutilized Sweet Potatoes into Healthy Snacks

Today, 8th March 2025, we join the global community to celebrate International Women’s Day under the theme, “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”

This year’s theme calls for action that can unlock power and opportunities for all. Central to this vision is empowering the next generation, youth, particularly young women and adolescent girls, as torchbearers for long-term change.

This year we celebrate Mary Ngugi, the CEO of Momix Enterprise. Mary is a leader in the value addition of sweet potatoes and bananas. She makes healthy snacks that are dense in nutrients and ready to eat. Her main goal is to reduce post-harvest losses on the sweet potato value chain experienced by farmers and increase consumption of this indigenous food.

Thanks to the HealthyDiets4Africa Agribusiness Accelerator Program, Cohort II, Mary has improved her business unit. Since joining the program and undergoing the training on the business development program, she has employed 3 young women who have enhanced production and marketing of the products.

She has also improved her branding and now leverages digital platforms to market and sell her products, unlike before joining the program, when she depended on in-person sales.

Mary is an indicator that investing in women can catalyze:

📈 Community development

💰 Agribusiness

💎 Innovations

🍠 Food and nutrition security.

With the HealthyDiets4Africa Agribusiness Accelerator Program at FSPN Africa, we are catalyzing ground for innovations by young women like Mary to learn skills that will help them be the stewards of change and the new face of our food system.

This is helping in the exponential growth of women employers through innovations in the food systems across Africa and impacting the growth of our communities. There are many women like Mary, whom we support; they need your support in terms of financial capital to bolster their expansion or even move from the ideation stage to prototype and product development.

We have taken empowerment action for all women. Join our course today to impact more women through their entrepreneurial journey.