Darshana Joshi

Joshi’s time at IMD helped hone her strategic, leadership, and entrepreneurial skills while inspiring a deeper reflection on her overall purpose.

In her career choices since IMD, she has made bold and non-traditional decisions. A few years after graduating, she moved to Rwanda to help establish Africa Improved Foods (AIF), a private-public partnership between the government of Rwanda and private and public-sector partners. AIF produces nutritious relief foods for refugee camps while supporting private-sector development and capacity building in East Africa.

Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi have some of the highest malnutrition and stunting rates in the world. Research has shown that stunting has long-term effects on individuals and societies, including poor cognition and educational performance, low adult wages, lost productivity, and an increased risk of nutrition-related chronic disease. As a result, East African nations and economies face a tremendous crisis in terms of productivity and health burdens.

Joshi is convinced that improving the alignment between the private sector and public sector for societal needs is necessary and overdue, and that ultimately all individuals in all countries—including consumers, suppliers, employees, and shareholders—will benefit, as well as the planet.

So, to address the inequities compounded by a lack of access to nutritious foods in East Africa, Joshi has combined her experience of working with consumer goods companies—both B2B and B2C—across Asia, Europe, and Africa with her IMD education to help amplify the impact that food systems can have on individuals in the most underserved communities.

Over the past six years, she has worked to improve food systems and increase the availability of nutritional products for undernourished people. She is the director of Food Systems for the Future Rwanda, a fund focused on providing growth capital to businesses operating in the food system and improving access to affordable and nutritious foods.

Through her work with the FSF Institute, she is exploring the development of an automated facility for producing insect-based protein in Kigali. This will lower product costs, increase access to nutritious animal-source protein for underserved communities, upcycle organic food waste, and produce highly efficient organic fertilizer.

In addition, she is the strategy and technical lead for the Rockefeller Foundation's Power of Procurement for Nutrition (PP4N) and Fortified Wholegrain Alliance (FWGA) Rwanda project facilitated through Vanguard Economics to increase access to healthy foods by maximizing the nutritional value of meals served in schools and other institutional settings through the fortified wholegrain initiative.

As an entrepreneur, she also co-founded Lentera Africa, an East African agricultural technology startup, with a fellow IMD MBA student.

Since her time at AIF, Joshi has continued to use her business acumen to lead multiple projects intended to bring financial inclusion to underserved communities and reduce food inequity. She is also a board member and investor at Benefactors, a non-bank financial institution launched in 2017 that connects impact funds with small and medium-sized enterprises.

For all her initiatives, she uses her business skills to innovate and direct in ways that create economic, social, and environmental impact and reduce inequities for the most vulnerable populations. She is an influential leader who uses her experience and education to initiate and lead innovative, market-driven food and agriculture enterprises that improve nutrition, sustainably, measurability, and profitably for targeted, underserved, and low-income communities in East Africa. She has seen the power of private-public enterprise models in the region and has embraced them to help governments deliver on their targets and reduce the financial and health burdens linked to poor diet.

Joshi strongly believes that it is incumbent upon business leaders to use their relevant expertise, knowledge, and resources to identify projects that bring about broader societal change in their communities. For her dynamism and resourceful approach to everything she does, IMD recognized her with an IMD-elea Social Impact Recognition Award in 2020. She received the award in front of 600 attendees at IMD's virtual All MBA Alumni Event.