USAID/Prosper Africa has awarded a $1.98 million co-investment grant to Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam’s Yolélé and Simballa Sylla’s Mali Shi SA, which it says will boost Mali’s fonio exports and create 13,700 jobs.
The ancient grain fonio has been grown as a subsistence crop in West Africa for over 5000 years. A new venture in Mali called West African Ancient Grains (WAAG) plans to turn fonio into a cash crop to provide a source of income for farmers in the Sahel region, one of the world’s most vulnerable areas. WAAG is an agro-processing operation being built by two companies: Yolélé, Chef Pierre Thiam’s US-based West African food brand, and Mali Shi SA, Mali’s leading shea butter manufacturer with a network of over 23,000 West African smallholder farmers, most of them women. The co-investment grant of $1.98 million is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) West Africa Trade & Investment Hub (Trade Hub) through Prosper Africa.
Nutritional cereal
Fonio is a drought-tolerant, gluten-free nutritional powerhouse that can be used like any other grain. Since 2017, Yolélé has been sharing the ancient West African grain in the US in collaboration with ingredient importer and distributor Woodland Foods, and is now expanding internationally. Yolélé has significantly advanced the neglected and underutilized crop’s visibility in the past 5 years by using it in products that have gained wide distribution in the US.
The investment supports U.S. market development and promotion, supply chain development, and the establishment of a new Mali-based processing center.
WAAG addresses 11 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals
WAAG, it says, will build a supply chain that traceably connects smallholder farmers living in extreme poverty with local and global markets for biodiverse, climate-resilient crops through efficient processing. The newly formed company aims to process thousands of tons of fonio to meet increasing global demand, contracting with thousands of smallholder farmers for production and helping them increase productivity by training in improved agronomic practices. The project will create 13,714 agricultural jobs in Mali, and $4.5 million in collective smallholder sales in the next two years. In addition, it is explained, WAAG’s implementation of value chain improvements will increase cash income for families in its grower network by an estimated 85 percent.
Pierre Thiam said: “Efficient processing has always been the missing link preventing farmers from earning livelihoods from fonio. Fonio is easy for smallholders to grow, but turning it into food is hard! There is no fonio processing facility in the world that can meet the volume and quality requirements of large global food companies looking for feasible ways to meet their UN SDG’s. We devoted a lot of resources to find a technical solution to industrial-scale processing, and a strong local partner at the source. West African Ancient Grains can deliver GFSI-compliant fonio, millet and sorghum flour for flexible applications to major food manufacturers. That changes the landscape in terms of farm income and traceable impact at scale”.
For his part, Simballa Sylla, CEO of Mali Shi, said: “Providing multiple sources of income for the farmers in our growing network has a huge impact on family life and rural landscape. It makes financial sense for farmers to engage in sustainable, biodiverse, multi-crop rotations only if they have customers for their harvests. West African Ancient Grains is that customer, an element that has been missing for smallholders in the Sahel”.
The Trade Hub’s co-investment partnership with Mali Shi and Yolélé marks its first in Mali. Frantz Tavares, Public-Private Partnership Manager for the Trade Hub, said: “Mali is ripe with opportunities to support economic growth through private investment, create long-term jobs for smallholder farmers, and increase exports of products such as fonio to the United States. I expect our project with Mali Shi/ Yolélé will prove this and encourage more investment into Mali’s high-potential businesses.”
Ambassador of African cuisine
Pierre Thiam is a chef, author, and social activist best known for bringing West African cuisine to the global fine dining world. He is the Executive Chef of the award-winning restaurant Nok by Alara in Lagos, Nigeria and the Signature Chef of the five-star Pullman Hotel in Dakar, Senegal. He is also the executive chef and co-owner of Teranga, a fast-casual food chain from New York City. His food company Yolélé promotes the interests of small-scale farmers in the Sahel by opening up new markets for products grown in Africa. Its flagship product is Yolélé fonio. Yolélé’s products are currently available in more than 2,000 grocery shops in the United States, including Whole Foods Market, Amazon, Target Superstores, Thrive Market and other retailers in the United States. Yolélé also partners with Woodland Foods, a food company specializing in global sourcing, custom blending and processing.
Born and raised in Dakar, Senegal, Thiam’s cooking style is at once modern and eclectic, rooted in the rich culinary traditions of West Africa. His newest cookbook, The Fonio Cookbook, was published in October 2019. His first two cookbooks, “Yolélé! Recipes From the Heart of Senegal” and “Senegal: Modern Senegalese Recipes from the Source to the Bowl” were finalists for several awards including the Julia Child Cookbook Award, the Gourmand Award in Paris, and the James Beard Award for Best International Cookbook.
Pierre Thiam has cooked for the King of Morocco, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. Through his advocacy and many media appearances, he has become known as a culinary ambassador, dedicated to promoting West African cooking throughout the world. His TEDTalk, given at TEDGlobal 2017 in Arusha, Tanzania, has been viewed over one million times. Thiam sits on the board of directors of IDEO.org, SOS Sahel, Culinary Institute of America’s African Cuisines Advisory Board and CorpsAfrica.
Since February 2019, Pierre Thiam has opened a restaurant in Harlem (New York) called “Teranga” (Hospitality) in the Africa Center. The restaurant offers recipes from several African countries including Senegal, Nigeria, Mali, Ivory Coast and Guinea. The recipes are based on West African ingredients such as sorghum and millet, accompanied by dried fruit for breakfast and also the main ingredient fonio, served in salads and bowls at lunch and dinner.
Mali Shi supplies the world’s leading shea butter marketers with their industrial-scale manufacturing facility, the only one of its kind in Mali. The company provides income to tens of thousands of women through its proprietary sourcing operations.
