Entrepreneur | Tech | Food & Agriculture Innovator

ABOUT

Nikki grew up in Massachusetts, USA after her family migrated from Ghana in West Africa. While living in the U.S. gave her incredible career and educational opportunities— Northwestern University B.A. & Harvard Business School M.B.A.—economic migration is not a viable option for the thousands of farming families back home in Kumasi, Ghana whose livelihood is tied to the land. Meanwhile, in the U.S. she saw first-hand how her parents, who have dietary restrictions, struggled to find great tasting snacks, which was not a problem when they were in Ghana.

She started Chaku Foods to create sustainable agricultural solutions that provide farmers in Ghana with more income, while creating delicious snacks that are better for consumers. By leveraging her global business experiences, she is creating systems that use group buying models and technology that at scale will generate wealth for millions of farmers across Africa and feed consumers around the world by creating better tasting snack brands.

Nikki founded Chaku Foods to create wealth for African farmers, reduce crop waste, and create better tasting snacks for people around the world. After working globally for Visa across 4 continents she saw how impactful VisaNet, a payment technology system, has been in facilitating commerce that creates wealth and impact for business, governments and people around the world. Similarly, Chaku Foods is utilizing technology and systems to create wealth for African farmers by buying crops directly from farmers at better rates, forecasting crop yields to reduce waste in harvest, and utilizing African crops to create nutritious, organic, better tasting snacks to feed consumers around the world.

Google Intern | Cambridge, MA (USA)
Nikki was one of the 4% of applicants admitted into the 3rd year of Google's BOLD undergraduate internship program. During that time she pitched and closed a $288K USD mobile advertising deal and collaborated with 3 interns to identify new ad revenue opportunities by analyzing data on 1,000+ companies to gain new business for 5 Google Cambridge internal teams. This experience influenced her desire to pursue a career in tech with roles that exposed her to both the technology and business operation.

Business Development Executive | San Francisco Bay Area (USA); Johannesburg (South Africa); Dubai (United Arab Emirates)
Nikki began her career in Visa Inc.'s New Grad Rotational Program at Visa's San Francisco Bay Area headquarters. For her first project, Nikki helped co-lead the project management team for PAVD (Pin-Authenticated Visa Debit), which at the time was Visa's largest product initiative in 2 decades and involved 200 internal Visa employees and impacted 7,000 clients. Her U.S. subsequent projects included increasing revenues on a Visa product by re-examining pricing structure; identifying high potential commercial opportunities between Visa & leading telcos and tech companies and lastly managing product design and technical process flow for international money transfer solution between Visa and key money transfer operator and Africa based mobile network operator.

Wanting to work on solutions that would develop electronic payments within Sub-Saharan Africa, Nikki relocated to Visa's Johannesburg office where she worked on business development focusing on merchants, government payments and fintech partners. Alongside her colleagues, Nikki created the business case and lobbied global Visa teams to create local African pricing (in 11 countries) for key payment sectors which have had lasting impacts in accelerating fintech companies, banks and merchant adoption of electronic payments in Africa. She also led merchant and acquiring bank relationships for Botswana (4th largest Visa Sub-Saharan Africa electronic payment volume market at the time). She also created the business cases to justify investment into several Visa fintech partnerships across Sub-Saharan Africa during her time in Johannesburg.

Recognizing a need to gain broader experiences & share and learn best practices with other emerging markets, she relocated from Visa's Johannesburg office to Visa's Dubai office. While in Dubai she worked directly with the Vice President for Visa's merchant business for Central Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA). Nikki's key responsibilities included defining and scoping the go-to-market strategy for the $2.3 trillion cash opportunity across 84 countries for Visa's CEMEA merchant business, and supporting high prirority deals in the region and optimizing budget allocation for merchant and fin-tech deals across the region.

While working for Visa in Central Europe, Middle East and Africa, Nikki saw that large retailers were often always Visa's largest merchant clients with hundreds of millions in payment volume. Specifically, in several Sub-Saharan African countries many retailers didn't sell crops and products sourced from African farmers or companies and Nikki recognized a gap in the market to integrate more African farmers and products into established retail not only in Africa, but the U.S. through exports. She wanted to create a system that enabled African farmers to be closely connected to finished products so they can share in the wealth generated through retail. She left Visa to pursue this idea and created Chaku Foods while pursuing her MBA at Harvard Business School.

Nikki enjoys reading, weight lifting, hiking and running. She's ran half marathons on 3 different continents. She also enjoys traveling and has visited 40 countries.