Maxima Nsimenta, MBA ’26: Using Agritech to Break a Cycle of Poverty and Environmental Degradation

In 2020, Maxima Nsimenta, MBA ’26, saw a constant parade of trucks pouring into Kampala, Uganda, piled high with charcoal made from shea trees that had been felled, covered in earth, left to smolder for days, and turned into black lumps. She immediately took note. Those trees produced shea nuts, an essential ingredient for the hair and skincare products made by Livara Natural Organics, Nsimenta’s beauty business. But more worryingly, the charcoal was evidence of a system that keeps farmers poor and strips the land bare — issues she wanted to help fix.

While a shea tree takes up to 25 years to bear fruit, high levels of poverty in the region mean farmers cannot afford to wait for the cyclical harvest. Desperate for immediate income, they cut down trees that could otherwise become a long-term asset.

Nsimenta has done the math. Cut down for charcoal, a mature shea tree earns a family about $150 — once. Left standing, its nuts bring in about $26 a year, matching the charcoal payout within six years. “After that, it simply keeps paying,” Nsimenta says. “A shea tree lives 200 to 300 years. Over 50 harvests, that’s $1,300 from a single tree.”

Many families in Northern Uganda harvest from around 80 mature trees, generating roughly $2,000 a year. Because saplings take 15 to 25 years to mature and bear fruit, protecting these established, centuries-old trees is urgent. In a region where the average rural farmer earns just $600 a year and 34% of the population lives below the poverty line, safeguarding the shea tree canopy provides a source of multi-generational income as well as an ecological shield, actively fighting desertification, storing carbon, and stabilizing the fragile soil of the local ecosystem.

Now, backed by a Stanford Impact Founder Fellowship, Nsimenta is building Farmetric, a data platform that enables farmers to document their income, capture the value of their orchards, attract lenders, and sell to premium buyers.

This will, of course, provide a steadier source of shea tree nuts for Livara. But Nsimenta has a bigger goal in mind for Farmetric: to create an incentive to leave trees standing while helping farmers increase their incomes and move out of poverty.

A Multi-Layered Problem

Nsimenta co-founded Livara with her sisters before she attended Stanford GSB, and the siblings were looking to expand. “But for a business to grow globally, you need a solid supply chain,” says Nsimenta. And while this increased her desire to prevent shea trees from being turned into charcoal, as she explored the reasons behind it, Nsimenta unearthed three key challenges.

Without data showing who owns the trees, what they yield, and that they will not be felled, buyers will not sign long-term contracts, leaving farmers with unpredictable incomes. Without data documenting their agricultural practices, farmers cannot secure the premium prices that reward environmental stewardship. And the lack of data confirming their creditworthiness makes it impossible to secure loans needed to build financially and environmentally sustainable agri-businesses.

Other insecurities compound these problems. For example, while U.S. farmers benefit from federal loan guarantees and subsidized crop insurance, Ugandan smallholders have no such support. “There is no safety net,” says Nsimenta.

The result is enduring poverty and a perpetuation of the incentives that drive the felling of trees that would otherwise provide families with a source of long-term income. Nsimenta had uncovered a complex cycle of interrelated problems — one she’s determined to break.

The Path to Impact

The seed of the idea for Nsimenta’s beauty business was planted early. Her parents, both with modest backgrounds, believed in the value of education and enrolled their children in good schools. But the missionary schools had strict rules around hair. African children were forced to cut theirs short, while white and biracial children were allowed to keep theirs long. Then, as an adult, Nsimenta was refused services in white-owned hair salons. “You’ll find the salons that work on people like you near the market,” one told her.

Nsimenta fought back. Cutting off all her hair and quitting her job as an engineer at an oil and gas services company, she and her sisters launched Livara. Their formulas for hair, body, and skincare products are derived from traditional recipes and ingredients: shea butter and other natural products generations of African women have used on their hair.

With her sisters, Nsimenta has built Livara into one of Uganda’s leading natural beauty companies. As a business that promotes equitable, ethical practices, it pays everyone fairly, including the farmers supplying shea nuts. Livara now has a chain of salons and more than 100 employees, including refugees from Congo — home to some of the region’s best hairdressers, according to Nsimenta. Initially hiring 10 from a refugee settlement, the company now employs 38 Congolese refugees.

But if sourcing raw materials led Nsimenta to uncover the drivers of farmer poverty and deforestation, it wasn’t until she arrived at Stanford GSB that she saw a way to address these problems simultaneously.

Nsimenta knew that legislation around agricultural sustainability is driving demand for ethically, sustainably produced shea nuts that come with farm-level traceability. For example, the EU Deforestation Regulation requires companies to demonstrate that certain commodities and the products they go into do not contribute to land or forest degradation.

Then, during the summer of 2025, she participated in Stanford’s Ecopreneurial Summer Innovation Sprint (EcoSprint) program, which enabled her to do eight weeks of field research in five Northern Ugandan districts. After conducting interviews with farmers, cooperative leaders, supply chain managers, investors, and global buyers, she developed a system that maps trees, forecasts yields for each, and records every payment so buyers can identify the source of the nuts.

Now, with her SIF Fellowship, she has been able to embark on field deployment and launch a pilot project that will demonstrate how, by enabling farmers to document their assets and earnings, Farmetric can help turn a tree from something to cut down into something to borrow against.

Data Unlocks Farming Incomes

Nsimenta’s research showed that putting farmers on a path to better livelihoods required data and technology. First, farmers needed a verifiable record of their identity, assets, and commercial track record. This is what Farmetric provides.

The company digitizes data on farmers’ acreage, the number of shea trees on that land, and the income generated each season. Using data collected by agricultural cooperatives and imagery generated by satellites and other existing geo-mapping technologies, Farmetric helps farmers track their production, enabling them to access the loans needed to invest in their businesses.

Farmetric then connects farmers to buyers, who can use this data to conduct due diligence and ensure that the raw materials in their supply chains are traceable and in compliance with environmental and ethical sourcing regulations. Once all this is verified, farmers can sell to buyers, who will pay almost 50% more for their shea nuts.

Access to data also opens up a future in which farmers could, by demonstrating the sustainability of their agricultural practices and improvements in soil health, generate and sell carbon credits through offset programs.

Understanding the on-the-ground realities Ugandan farmers face, Nsimenta designed the system so that data is accessed via text messages that do not require a smartphone or high-speed broadband.

The low-tech, small-scale nature of local farming creates another possibility: to cultivate complementary crops on the same acreage. Shea trees are scattered among fields rather than in plantations, so the land on which they grow can be used for crops, such as sunflowers and groundnuts, increasing farmer incomes. “And the trees provide shade for other crops, so it’s a self-sustaining system,” says Nsimenta.

In the next five years, Nsimenta believes Farmetric will reach 2 million farming households across the African shea belt, preserving more than 8 million trees and generating sustainable livelihoods for participating farmers. Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment intends to support Farmetric and has invited Nsimenta to represent Uganda as a part of its COP31 delegation.

A Launchpad for Action

Nsimenta next plans to approach investors, and she believes the SIF Fellowship has been critical in getting her to this point. In addition to the $110,000 in funding, the fellowship comes with access to resources and networks, as well as coaching and mentorship — all of which have helped her think through tough problems and arrive at solutions. In addition to guidance from Stanford faculty and staff, she received support from classmates, especially from those in the Africa Business Club and Black Business Student Association.

The fellowship also establishes credibility, evident through Nsimenta’s recent conversation with the East African Development Bank. The bank is keen to fund her because of her focus on sustainable agriprocessing, particularly since Uganda has been awarded a $31 million results-based grant from the Green Climate Fund in recognition of the country’s forest conservation and climate resilience efforts.

Beyond all this, the fellowship has given her something equally valuable: confidence. “It’s the investment in me to ensure I make this a success,” she says. “Stanford has really helped in that way.”