Meet Anne Toba, Founder of Yaji Spice 

Anne Toba founded Yaji Spice in 2023, empowering women farmers across West Africa. The inspiration came from Anne’s mother and grandmother. “In 2011, we started working with women in Africa,” Anne says. “And the reason for this is because of two women in my life: my mother and my grandmother.”

Despite being very smart, Anne’s mother was not sent to school. Her brothers went without her. Anne’s grandmother didn’t want her grandchildren to face the same fate. She reasoned that if Anne’s mother married a teacher, all her grandchildren would be educated, even the girls.

“My grandmother, because of her experience with my mother, told my mother, ‘you have to marry a teacher.’ And my mother didn’t want to marry my Dad, who was the English teacher in the village. Because my mother had a very tall and handsome man she wanted to marry,” Anne says.

For several years they went back and forth. Anne’s mother eventually gave in and married the English teacher. Together, they had three girls, then three boys. “And of course we all went to school. So if these two women did not make that decision then, I’d be a village farmer just like the women I’m helping. So I’m standing on very, very big shoulders. These two women changed my life,” Anne says.

Because of their influence, Anne created Ripples in Africa. “So that is why I set up Ripples, to help women,” Anne says. And she wanted the change to be generational. “The ripple effect of helping just one woman is more than the woman you’re helping: it is generational. . . For every woman we support, there are at least four children, five children, six children, that benefit directly from her. For example, they get fed, they go to school, and the mother is saving to make sure they’re taken care of,” Anne comments.

The women that Anne is helping are between the ages of eighteen and fifty or sixty, many of whom have children. “They’re farmers. These are really, really poor people who live in huts . . . A lot of the time they can’t feed their kids, they can’t send their kids to school. Those are the kind of women we work with,” Anne says. “So you can imagine when we intervene, and we give them implements and give them seeds to farm, and give them land to farm on. They begin to have something to work with that would at least provide food for them.”

Anne surveyed the women she was working with and asked for the top three things Ripples could do for them. They answered that they wanted to be able to send their children to school, to be able to take care of any of their sick children, and to save for the future. “Whatever project we’re running has to at least satisfy that,” Anne says.

Her favorite part of running her own business is the women she gets to help. “So when I started, I said to myself, if I can just help two women, right, I can tell my mom. Mom would be happy that I remembered her story and I did something about it,” Anne says.

When asked about the most challenging part of running a business, Anne is direct and to the point. “Funding,” she says. “If I had the money, every single African country has invited Ripples to come. Every single African country. The problem is not that we don’t have women. The problem is that I don’t have the money to help all of them. There is no time when we don’t have a waiting list of at least ten thousand women.”

When asked how to learn more about the organization, Anne says that visits to Africa is one way. Volunteering is another. “They can work on projects with us where they get to work directly with groups of women. . . There are lots of ways that people can get to work with us.”

Overall, the goal is to effect intergenerational change and transform lives for the better. “What I think people don’t understand about our work is to understand how little, how small the amount is needed to literally transform lives generationally,” Anne says.