Judith Kaaria

Tanzania is not a country most people associate with wine. That, in a sense, is exactly the opportunity Judith Endelesi Karia has been building toward, and the gap that makes Ava Group Investments Ltd. worth paying attention to.

Ava Group makes wine from pineapples and grapes, sourcing from smallholder farmers along Tanzania’s coast and in the Dodoma region, a high-altitude area with a long history of grape cultivation that has never quite developed the processing infrastructure its farmers deserved. Judith’s recognition as 1st Runner Up in the Women Empowerment Champion category at the 2024 WAYA competition came at a pivotal moment: the business was ready to move, and the award gave it the means and the visibility to do so.

A facility in the heart of the farms

The prize money went into two things: land in Dodoma and a vehicle. Neither sounds remarkable in isolation, but together they represent a strategic repositioning of the entire business. The land became the site of a new production facility in the Mpunguzi area, built directly in the middle of the grape farming zone it would serve. By the ten-month mark, that facility was complete and operational.

The logic was straightforward and the results were immediate. Transportation costs dropped by 61%. Post-harvest losses fell by 40%. Ava Santiago wines, the brand Judith has been building, reached over 1,000 new customers in Dodoma, Mwanza, and Shinyanga, regions that had previously been out of reach. The vehicle purchased with prize funds became the supply chain link connecting farm to factory to distributor, collapsing the logistical chain that had previously made expansion difficult. Revenue grew 5% in the period, a modest headline figure that understates the structural improvement happening beneath it.

4,000 farmers, 87% women

Judith’s model has always been as much about the farmers who supply her as the bottles that leave her factory. Over 350 smallholder farmers, more than 200 growing grapes, the rest pineapples, supply Ava Group’s raw materials. Eighty-seven percent of them are women. Through a training programme sponsored by the US Department of State, over 4,000 farmers received practical instruction in modern farming techniques and value addition over the period. The logic of the programme is the same as Ava Group’s business model: surplus fruit that would otherwise rot becomes wine; farmers who would otherwise absorb that loss instead earn from it.

Pineapple and grape waste from the production process gets repurposed into animal feed for local livestock farmers, a circular economy practice that closes yet another loop in a value chain Judith has been deliberately tightening from multiple ends.

A mentor from Moët Hennessy

One of the more unusual elements of Judith’s post-award journey was a mentorship pairing arranged through the FAO program in partnership with WAYA: her global mentor came from Moët Hennessy. For a founder building a wine brand from fruit farms in Tanzania, the access that brought, to global wine market dynamics, to branding and storytelling discipline, to investor presentation skills, was genuinely rare. Judith describes it as transformative, and the evidence shows in how she talks about the business: with the kind of clarity about positioning and scalability that comes from having had those conversations at the right moment.

She also spoke at the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, the CEO Chat leadership session, and was named among Tanzania’s Top 50 Young Women Entrepreneurs. Informal mentorship circles she runs now guide 17 young women entrepreneurs through the early stages of building agribusiness ventures.

The constraint that demand creates

The honest tension in Judith’s story at ten months post-winning WAYA was the gap between how fast the market was moving and how fast the business could supply it. The new Dodoma facility is operational, but production capacity has not yet caught up with demand, particularly during peak harvest seasons. It is the kind of problem that is better than the alternative, but it is still a problem, and one that capital alone can solve.

What WAYA set in motion for Judith was not a transformation from scratch. It was an acceleration of something that was already coherent, a supply chain connecting women farmers to a branded product with genuine market appetite, in a category Tanzania has barely begun to develop. The facility in Mpunguzi is the physical proof of that acceleration. What comes next depends on whether the investment follows.