A Maaro Njawaan rice paddy in Mauritania

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania — In a country where just 5 percent of top managers are women, Safietou Kane is something of an anomaly. Starting your own company as CEO at 23 years of age, on the other hand, might be considered remarkable in any context — male or female — but that is precisely what Safietou did when she founded her family agribusiness firm, Maaro Njawaan, in her hometown of Tékane in Traza, Mauritania, after completing her Bachelor of Science degree in International Business and Management at the University of Tampa in the United States last year.

Hailing from the fertile Senegal River Valley zone in the south, Safietou is no stranger to agriculture and was brought up keenly aware of the problems that plague Mauritanian farmers, most notably the lack of commercial outlets for their production and competition from imported agricultural goods, particularly rice. Like its regional neighbors, Mauritania consumes twice as much rice as it produces. Food imports have increased exponentially in recent years, particularly since the food crisis in 2007. As Safietou acknowledges, however, such a high level of imports often comes at the expense of local farmers and smallholders, whose livelihoods depend on rice.

Despite falling demand prices, however, Safietou saw an opportunity for her and her community, establishing a private company that would support local rice producers by buying their high-quality rice and then milling it in a local factory before packaging and transporting the product to stores in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou in the north.

Working along the entire value chain, Safietou’s firm is able to purchase rice directly from producers, regularizing production and providing stable employment in her hometown. It is widely recognized that nurturing national agricultural production has great potential for economic development and poverty reduction, particularly in rural areas, although Safietou admits that she was also motivated by other considerations.

“What we want to show is that high-quality rice is already available here in Mauritania, and [that] we should be proud of our local products.” As in many African countries, Mauritanian goods suffer from a poor image among consumers. Indeed, Mauritanians often deride their own country’s products as being of lower quality, preferring to pay a higher price for rice from Asia.