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Mira Mehta

CO-FOUNDER & CEO

Tomato Jos

Mira Mehta is the CEO and founder of Tomato Jos Farming and Processing Limited, a for-profit social enterprise that specializes in the farming and processing of tomatoes into paste. Prior to Tomato Jos, she worked at the Clinton Health Initiative, where she was responsible for ensuring that people living in rural areas in Nigeria had better access to HIV-related healthcare. It was on one of her trips in the North that she conceived of the idea for Tomato Jos, after seeing huge volumes of tomatoes drying by the roadside - these were here as a result of the annual tomato market glut in Nigeria, which forces farmers to sell at very low prices. She knew right away that these farmers would benefit from a processing facility that could guarantee consistent, fair prices for their produce.

Ms. Mehta went back to the United States in 2012 to get her MBA from Harvard Business School, and returned to Nigeria upon graduating, after conducting a series of feasibility studies for the idea that she had conceived. She started operations in a small village called Panda Development Area in Nasarawa State, and moved the company to Kaduna State in 2017 after a successful proof of concept.