Young African Entrepreneur

Mira Mehta is the founder and CEO of Tomato Jos, a tomato paste company based in Kaduna, Nigeria. You can connect with her @ShoutsAndMiras and @TeamTomatoJos on Twitter. Mira was born and raised in New England in the US. Fresh out of college, she landed her first job at BlackRock, a large asset manager. Driven and ambitious, Mira quickly realized that she’d never have a leadership role, as her department was just a “line item” in the company’s P&L. She was looking to make more of an impact and joined the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which sent her to Nigeria. While she was once driving to Kano in northern Nigeria, Mira saw a glut of tomatoes lining the side of the road. The quantity of rotting tomatoes was so great that the road resembled a red carpet. The image lingered with her. Why was Nigeria, which imports hundreds of millions of dollars of tomato paste per year, not able to manufacture tomato paste locally from its domestic tomato crop? After finishing her MBA at Harvard, Mira still couldn’t sh