Fidelity Young Entrepreneurship Initiative Success Stories - Pure and Just Name of Business Pure and Just Name of Business Owner Yvette Tetteh Tell us who you are? Yvette Tetteh is a British-Ghanaian business owner, writer, and creative living in Accra. She is co-founder and CEO of the climate-smart agribusiness Pure and Just Co, which transforms tropical fruit into natural dried fruit products in Ghana. What motivated you to start the business? We noticed a gap in the agricultural value chain that was leaking resources from development. We observed a startling lack of local value-added processing in Ghana. We decided to link rural farm produce to local and foreign retail opportunities via our dried fruit company–stimulating economic growth by enhancing an under-developed local value-added agribusiness sector. Our circular climate-smart model increases farmer income by 40% and reduces spoilage and post-harvest losses by 50% on average. Kindly elaborate on some of your achievements? We began operations in May 2016 and have grown from 3 farmers and 6 employees to 8 farmers in 3 regions of Ghana, employing 14 people (all under 35, 70% of whom are women). We grew sales by over 100% in both 2018 and 2019 and by 1.2x in 2020. We have generated $94k in lifetime revenue. Any challenges/lessons learned? Due to manufacturing faults, our new dryer was not able to operate consistently; it went fully out of commission in the second week of January. We identified two gas experts from the cocoa industry and paid them to take a look at our dryer in May 2021. They were able to get the dryer functioning. In the course of our operations, we have had to learn how to adapt and remain solution-oriented, rather than lose energy to worrying without action. We have also learned that a crucial component of entrepreneurship is personal resilience. How has the funding received from the program helped your business? With the FYEF funding, we were able to import our dehydrator and achieve a key milestone in attaining export viability. Without the funding, we would not have been able to make the 2.5x increase in production capacity we needed to access the lucrative export market. Advice to young upcoming entrepreneurs Build your network, make real friends. Non-monetary assistance will be crucial to growth. Click here to start your application process and submit supporting documents.
