The earthy cassava root is a dietary staple for millions across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. For Pelkins Ajanoh (MS/MBA 2022), the tuber was also the starting point for CassVita, an agritech-based venture he cofounded in 2019 that is already creating jobs and expanding economic opportunities in his home country of Cameroon. In May, CassVita was honored with a Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge Award funded by the Bertarelli Foundation.

Cassava is grown globally by an estimated 20 million farmers, most of whom are women, who average under a dollar a day per capita income. Since cassava spoils within three days of harvesting, it is traditionally used in small-scale family cooking. Roughly 40 percent of the annual harvest is lost due to rapid, methane gas–producing spoilage. Ajanoh and his childhood friend and CassVita cofounder, Nembu Emmanuel, saw that scenario as “a space for innovation” that could improve the lives of farmers by maximizing the amount of produce they can bring to market.

Ajanoh and Emmanuel leveraged their engineering degrees and entrepreneurial ambitions to develop, with their team, novel biotechnology that extends cassava’s shelf life from three days to 18 months. The process transforms the cassava tuber into nutritious food products that provide alternatives to wheat flour. The first product CassVita introduced—a gluten-free powder that can be reconstituted with water to make fufu, a thick paste used in various recipes—was originally produced for the African market and is now available at 50 supermarkets around the world.

The company plans to expand its range of products, thereby gaining a foothold in the $1 trillion global health-and-wellness food market. This could yield unprecedented opportunities for the 500 farmers in Cameroon from whom CassVita sources the produce.

“I love using technology to solve intractable problems,” says Ajanoh, whose credentials include a mechanical engineering degree from MIT and patented novel technologies for self-driving vehicles. “But I don’t want to just make an app that delivers Instacart items five seconds sooner. My career vision is to tackle difficult challenges to benefit people in vulnerable communities and make a measurable improvement in life on our planet. Learning to build a successful company is a stepping stone to that.”

At HBS, Ajanoh acquired the knowledge, contacts, and managerial skills to further CassVita’s early promise. Several courses were particularly relevant as Ajanoh worked through early-stage challenges with an eye toward scaling operations after graduation. “The cases in Globalization and Emerging Markets were about business realities I’ve been living every day,” he notes. “Finance was the subject where I had the least experience before coming to HBS, so learning how capital flows, how to analyze cash statements, and how to quantify progress was very helpful to me.”

Ajanoh also found supportive communities at the Harvard i-lab and the Social Innovation and Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, which awarded him a 2021 Cheng Fellowship. But to meet the challenges of scholarship and running a business, he says, the combination of peer and faculty mentoring, classroom exercises, and access to guest experts in the elective Field X was invaluable. “Having a class where I could focus on building CassVita, check in weekly with [Senior Lecturer] Randy Cohen, and benefit from his knowledge and connections was an amazing opportunity,” he notes.

An investment management expert and senior lecturer in HBS’s Finance Unit, Cohen teaches Field X and Y, which are field courses for entrepreneurs. “Businesses like CassVita have a double bottom line,” he says. “They have enormous potential for societal impact while offering tremendous opportunities for return-driven investors. Introducing a phenomenal young entrepreneur like Pelkins to investors is really satisfying. The benefits will flow in both directions.”

Juggling the responsibilities of financing and building a Cameroon-based company while pursuing a joint degree at HBS and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences during the pandemic took all of Ajanoh’s spare time. During the January 2022 term break, he went to West Africa to check on operations, connect with stakeholders, and iron out supply chain and regulatory issues at the United States Embassy in Cameroon.

“Establishing a stable supply chain is a huge challenge to making this work right now,” Ajanoh notes. “But overall, we are gaining momentum. We have an innovation the market is excited about, and if we do this right, you’ll be seeing our products on the shelves at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. More importantly,” he says, “we’ll be empowering African farmers and opening paths that will help others succeed for years to come.”

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