How a woman who dropped out of school in Standard Two built the Southern Highlands’ largest fortified flour empire
By Anthony Muchoki
Twenty years ago, in the streets of Iringa, Rita Bathlomeo Sekilovele made her living selling traditional brew. The work brought money, yes, but it also brought something else: the sideways glances, the whispered judgments, the regular confrontations with local authorities who viewed her trade as a social vice. Every day she sold was another day carrying the weight of stigma.
One morning, she decided enough was enough.
“I looked at those two debes of maize—just 20 kilograms total—and I thought, this is where I start,” she recalls. That decision, made in a moment of quiet determination, would eventually transform her into Mama Seki, the woman whose fortified flour now feeds communities across Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan.
The Unlikeliest Industrialist
If you met Mama Seki today, walking through her expanded milling facility in Iringa where the hum of machinery processing 10 to 15 tonnes of maize per day provides a constant industrial heartbeat, you might never guess her educational background. She dropped out of school in Standard Two.
“I only know how to write my name, to sign papers,” she says with characteristic candor. Then comes the smile, confident and knowing. “But I am great at counting money and handling financial issues!”
It’s this combination—humility about her limitations, fierce confidence in her strengths—that defines her approach to business. In 2008, when Super Seki Investment officially began operations, she had a single milling machine with the capacity to process one to two tonnes of maize. The local produce market was there, but so was a persistent problem: post-harvest losses were devastating. Quality standards were inconsistent. Farmers were getting shortchanged.
Mama Seki saw not just a business opportunity, but a covenant with her community. She would provide a reliable market. She would add value. She would do it right.
Building the Ecosystem
The early years were about learning—not from textbooks, but from the field. Through partnerships with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA), she began attending seminars that focused on what really mattered: humidity management to minimize aflatoxin development, record-keeping, accounting, marketing strategies.
For someone who never made it past Standard Two, these weren’t academic exercises. They were survival tools, competitive edges, the difference between a small operation and something that could genuinely transform lives.
“The efforts have not rendered futile,” she notes, understating what would become a remarkable growth trajectory. “We have enabled other markets outside Iringa: Ifakara, Morogoro, Lindi, Mtwara, and Dar es Salaam. We source produce from over 5,000 farmers spread across Iringa, Njombe, Mbeya, Ruvuma, and Sumbawanga.”
By the time the numbers are tallied today, that figure is closer to 25,000 farmers working through more than 500 organized farmer groups. They bring their maize to Mama Seki because they know three things: she will buy, she will pay fairly, and she will handle the grain with care.
The Infrastructure of Transformation
In 2022, AGRA and USAID provided a TSh 40 million grant to build a storage facility. The warehouse, designed to safely store produce and serve more farmers, was scheduled for completion by July of that year. It represented something more than just corrugated iron and concrete floors—it was a bet on the future, a recognition that Mama Seki’s model was working.
The model itself is elegant in its simplicity. Through partnerships with the Tanzania Agricultural Partnerships for Business Development Services (TAPBDS), she secured access to working capital—a TSh 500 million loan from NMB Bank that she’s methodically repaying over three years. As of the AGRA board visit captured in the video transcripts, she was also negotiating a loan from the Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB) for approximately $1.8 million USD, earmarked for further expansion of working capital and warehouse capacity.
“Mama Seki had a huge need for working capital to run her operations,” explains Joseph Migunda, Director of TAPBDS, describing how they supported her through documentation, pre-qualification, and the entire loan application process. “We’ve also built infrastructure for her to source raw materials from farmer cooperatives across Iringa, Njombe, Rukwa, and Katavi, so she can sell domestically and internationally.”
The international piece is what catches people’s attention. Today, you can find Super Seki’s fortified flour in Congolese markets, Kenyan stores, Rwandan shops, and as far as South Sudan. For a woman who started with two tins of maize, the geography of impact is staggering.
The Science of Fortification
But Mama Seki’s contribution goes beyond tonnage and markets. Her flour is fortified—deliberately engineered to address nutrition gaps in communities where malnutrition remains a persistent challenge. In a region where food security and nutrition outcomes are still serious concerns, this attention to nutritional quality elevates her work from commerce to public health.
“The food she is producing is fortified for an area where nutrition is still critically important,” notes Dr. Agnes Kalibata, President of AGRA, during the board visit to Iringa some times back. “Her contribution, her paying attention to the issue of nutrition and fortification, are extremely important as well.”
It’s this dual focus—commercial viability and social impact—that makes Mama Seki’s enterprise a template for what agricultural transformation can look like when it’s done right. She’s not just processing maize; she’s addressing food shortage and malnutrition at scale.
The Challenges That Remain
Mama Seki is refreshingly honest about the obstacles. “Most of the challenges we are facing right now are limitations to expand production to match the market due to high costs of machines, late payments, and insufficient capital to help in building more storage and production units as needed,” she acknowledges.
The capital constraints are real. So are the late payments from buyers that strain cash flow. The cost of upgrading machinery—the kind of industrial-grade equipment that would allow her to scale from 10-15 tonnes per day to 30, 50, even 100 tonnes—remains prohibitively expensive without external financing or patient capital.
Yet she presses forward. Her current expansion project in Ruvuma region has already commenced, designed to serve customers across Ruvuma, Mtwara, and Lindi. The vision extends even further: she’s eyeing Burundi, DRC, Rwanda, Kenya, and South Sudan as part of a deliberate strategy to help curb food shortage and malnutrition across East Africa.
“I want to get a larger machine so I can produce tonnes in volume,” she says plainly. “I’m waiting for the agricultural bank to support me, to give me the grinding machines.”
The Ecosystem in Action
What makes Mama Seki’s story particularly instructive is that she didn’t do this alone. Her success is embedded in a wider ecosystem of support—AGRA, PIATA, TAPBDS, TADB, NMB Bank, the Village-Based Advisors (VBAs) who connect her to farmers at the village level, the agro-dealers like Alpha Agrovet who supply inputs to those same farmers, the farmer cooperatives who aggregate produce.
During the AGRA board visit, Vianney Rweyendela, AGRA’s Country Manager for Tanzania, contextualized her role: “Four or five years ago she was running a very small processing plant, but as she became sure of getting more produce, she expanded. She is serving nearly 25,000 farmers and may serve more than 50,000 farmers in the future when she finishes this building. But moreover, she’s creating job employment across the value chain.”
This is the architecture of transformation: not a lone heroic entrepreneur, but a network of mutually reinforcing relationships where success compounds. The VBAs aggregate farmer demand for inputs and link them to agro-dealers. The agro-dealers supply quality seeds and fertilizer. The farmers produce better yields. Mama Seki provides an assured market. The fortified flour reaches consumers. Employment is created at every node.
“That’s the ecosystem we want to see,” Dr. Kalibata emphasizes. “That’s the agriculture ecosystem when it’s built well—it really reduces poverty for farmers. This lady here is contributing to poverty reduction. A small effort of giving her the right business services, giving her a little bit of catalytic support here and there, has turned her into a huge business contributing to the economy of this area.”
The Digital Frontier
The ecosystem is also increasingly digital. During the same board visit, discussions turned to the role of technology in scaling impact. Rweyendela described digital platforms that link weight scales at farmer cooperatives directly to mobile phones, eliminating cheating and providing real-time data. VBAs can place orders through apps that pop up instantly at agro-dealer locations, cutting travel time and transaction costs to near zero.
“We’ve been talking about the kilometers farmers travel to access inputs,” Rweyendela notes. “Now we don’t talk about kilometers, because by having an app, you are at zero kilometer to where the inputs are.”
For Mama Seki, this digitalization means better traceability, improved inventory management, and eventually, easier access to financing as banks gain visibility into her operations through data rather than just paperwork.
A Woman in a Man’s Field
It would be incomplete to tell Mama Seki’s story without acknowledging the gender dimension. Agricultural industrialization in Tanzania—and across Africa—remains overwhelmingly male-dominated. Women entrepreneurs face additional barriers: access to credit, land rights, social expectations about their roles, the persistent assumption that “serious business” is men’s work.
Mama Seki shattered those assumptions with every tonne of maize she milled. She built relationships with male-dominated farmer cooperatives. She negotiated with banks. She secured loans measured in hundreds of millions of shillings. She expanded into international markets. She did all of this while navigating the social stigma of her earlier work and the educational limitations that could have easily become excuses for staying small.
“She is part of our community,” Dr. Kalibata says, and the phrase carries weight. In the AGRA ecosystem, Mama Seki isn’t just a service provider—she’s a partner, a proof point, a living demonstration that agricultural transformation powered by women entrepreneurs can work at scale.
Looking Forward: The Next Chapter
At the AGRA African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), Mama Seki presented her business in the deal room, a space designed to connect SMEs like hers with investors who can provide the capital needed for the next growth phase.
“Ladies like this, businesses like this, come and present some of the opportunities,” Dr. Kalibata explains. “They are transforming their lives, they are transforming other people’s lives, and they need support, especially in terms of cash and cash flow. They are not asking for a lot. They need investments so that they can grow their businesses.”
The ask is specific: machinery to scale from 10-15 tonnes per day to something significantly larger, additional warehouse capacity to serve the growing network of farmers, working capital to smooth out the seasonal cash flow challenges that come with agricultural cycles.
The potential return on that investment? A woman who has already proven she can grow from two tins of maize to feeding five countries, now positioned to serve 50,000 farmers while addressing malnutrition through fortified products.
The Broader Canvas
In many ways, Mama Seki’s story is Tanzania’s story—or at least the Tanzania that policymakers envision when they talk about agricultural transformation and industrialization. According to Dr. Donald Mmari, Executive Director of REPOA (Research on Poverty Alleviation), “Tanzania’s economy is agrarian. By improving agriculture production and raising productivity, it will automatically attract different forward and backward linkages. One of the most important linkages is agro-based manufacturing.”
Super Seki Investment operates at the heart of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), a public-private partnership launched in 2010 to systematically transform Tanzanian agriculture. The corridor model is ambitious: bring 350,000 hectares into profitable production by 2030, lift two million people out of poverty, strengthen value chains connecting smallholder farmers to markets, and do it all while maintaining environmental sustainability.
SAGCOT spans eight key regions across Tanzania’s Southern Highlands and coastal zones—precisely the geography where Mama Seki sources her maize from over 500 farmer groups. The initiative has become a model for agricultural transformation across Africa, demonstrating how coordinated public-private partnerships can improve incomes, create employment, and build the processing infrastructure that turns raw agricultural potential into economic value.
Within this framework, Super Seki isn’t just a processor; it’s a major actor within the SAGCOT ecosystem, serving as a critical node that connects smallholder production to regional and international markets. The fortified flour leaving her facility every day represents exactly what SAGCOT was designed to achieve: commercially viable agricultural enterprises that simultaneously address food security, create rural employment, and contribute to nutrition outcomes.
The model has proven so successful that it’s expanding. Today, SAGCOT’s institutional architecture has evolved into the broader Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania (AGCOT) framework, applying the corridor approach to additional regions and value chains beyond the Southern Highlands. But SAGCOT remains the foundational proof of concept—and Mama Seki remains one of its most compelling success stories.
This is exactly what Mama Seki represents: agro-based manufacturing that creates backward linkages to farmers (through assured markets and input support) and forward linkages to consumers (through fortified, quality products). She embodies the government’s vision, proving that the path from middle-income status isn’t through mining or tourism alone, but through the systematic transformation of the sector where 65% of Tanzanians still earn their living.
“You cannot talk of agribusiness and leave out manufacturing in Tanzania’s setting,” notes Vianney Rweyendela, and Mama Seki is Exhibit A.
The Measure of Success
If you ask Mama Seki what success looks like, she doesn’t point to the awards or recognition or even the growing bank accounts. She points to the farmers.
“Some of these farmers bring just one or two tins of maize,” she explains, referring to the smallest producers—the ones who would be ignored by larger processors focused only on volume. “But I am ready to receive them here.”
That willingness to serve even the smallest farmer, to remain rooted in the community even as the business grows international, to remember the stigma she once carried and extend dignity to others—this is perhaps her greatest achievement.
The numbers tell one story: from 2 tins to 10-15 tonnes per day, from one village to five countries, from 2,000 farmers to 25,000 and climbing. But the human story tells another: a woman who society once marginalized is now the economic heartbeat of the Southern Highlands, the link between 500+ farmer groups and markets across East Africa, the employer creating jobs across the value chain, the nutrition champion addressing malnutrition through fortification.
“I thank all the stakeholders and the government for the support they have accorded us,” Mama Seki says, “by taking the role of catalyst to help develop our economy and, most obviously, our livelihoods. It is through them that we have learned a lot about the processes and many other things that help in making alignment of our actions with the vision to create a food-secure nation.”
A food-secure nation. From a woman who can only write her name but is brilliant at counting money. From two tins of maize to an industrial operation with regional impact. From social stigma to being called “Mama”—the honorific that signals respect, affection, and community standing—by thousands of farmers across the Southern Highlands.
This is what transformation looks like when it’s built not on credentials or connections, but on determination, community covenant, and the stubborn belief that agriculture can be the engine of prosperity.
Mama Seki proved it. Now she’s scaling it.
And somewhere in Iringa, in Njombe, in Rukwa, in Katavi, another young woman is watching, calculating, wondering if she too can transform two tins of something into an enterprise that feeds nations.
The answer, if Mama Seki’s life is any indication, is yes.
But only if she’s willing to work for it, learn what she doesn’t know, stay rooted in community, and refuse to accept the limitations that others place on her.
Rita Bathlomeo Sekilovele is the Director of Super Seki Investment, based in Iringa, Tanzania. Her company produces fortified maize flour and serves over 25,000 smallholder farmers across Tanzania’s Southern Highlands.