Yi Li
speaker
85 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 19 Jan
Yi Li’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In 2024, we sold 100 million tomatoes.
That might sound like a lot.
Until you do the math, it's barely two tomatoes per person in Kenya.
So we still have a lot of room to grow and a long way to go.
And remember my original dream of building 1,000 farms?
That is still being realized, but in a different way.
Today, the farms are being built not by us, but by the farmers who know their own land and communities the best.
With steady market offtake and consistent income from us, they are now able to invest in their own farms and reach out to us when they need help.
Finding financial sustainability was not easy.
For years, after finding our market, we were still bleeding money.
I had to make difficult decisions of shutting down prized demonstration farms, halting new partnerships, even closing regions that were too far away for us to serve.
Turns out it was really difficult to save money compared to spending it.
But I knew the only way for us to survive and grow our impact is through finding financial sustainability.
Today, we're a business with healthy margins and growth.
More than 300 employees work for us, and more than 10,000 market vendors rely on us for their daily supplies.
The hard lesson I learned from the years of being a social entrepreneur is that real sustainability, climate or otherwise, must come from economics first.
Think about it.
When farmers earn an income, they can invest in better practices.
When companies achieve profitability, we can protect and scale our impact.
When communities prosper economically, they're able and can afford to care about their environment in the long term.
Showing 61–80 of 85 · page 4 of 5
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