Myriam Marara

Most impact stories are told against a backdrop of possibility. Myriam Nabintu Marara’s must be told against a backdrop of war.

Goma, in eastern DR Congo, is a city that has lived with conflict for decades, and in the period covered by Myriam’s reporting,, it was living with it again, acutely. The relay supply depots that Milele Lab depended on for raw materials sat in Rutshuru and Masisi, territories that fell under rebel occupation during the reporting period. Raw material costs spiked as insecurity disrupted farming and multiple layers of taxation, from rebel forces and government forces alike, piled onto every transaction. Then Goma itself fell, and with it the displacement of the population that formed Milele Lab’s core market. Demand for broiler meat collapsed. Feed sales followed.

That Myriam had anything to report at all, beyond survival, was the first remarkable thing. That what she reported was growth was the second.

Milele Lab had started with a clear proposition: transform locally sourced agricultural waste into affordable, quality poultry feed for smallholder farmers who had previously depended on expensive imported alternatives. Before the award, the company ran six employees and two farm depots. By the one-year mark, through everything the east of the DRC had thrown at it, the team had grown to fifteen, all of them youth, six of them women, and the depot network had expanded from two to five, reaching into Rutshuru and Masisi despite the instability there. A new pelleting machine had been acquired. The production and storage facility had been renovated. An R&D programme had been launched for laying hen formulations, extending Milele Lab’s offering beyond broiler feed for the first time and opening a new segment of the poultry farming market.

The financing model Myriam had built around her product was as important as the product itself. Fifty-seven partner farmers were accessing feed through a pay-as-you-go arrangement, no upfront payment required, structured instead around what farmers could actually manage. In a context where financial exclusion was not an abstract policy problem but a daily lived reality, that model was the difference between a farmer being a customer or not. One hundred and fifty farmers were supplying cereals and agricultural waste through the depot network, their waste becoming Milele Lab’s input and their income becoming more reliable as a result.

Beyond production, Myriam had taken on mentorship of young women entrepreneurs from partner farming and breeding associations, with a specific focus on building entrepreneurial resilience in a conflict context, sharing not just business tools but the harder, less teachable thing: how to keep moving when the ground is genuinely unstable beneath you.

The year had also brought recognition that extended well beyond Goma. She was selected for the Social and Inclusive Business Camp 2024, the FAO-IAFN Women SME Accelerator Program, and the Mastercard Foundation FAST Program, each one reserved for entrepreneurs with demonstrated high-impact potential. Each one also brought structured training: growth strategy, investment readiness, corporate governance, value chain management. Myriam was building the leadership architecture of a serious enterprise, even as the physical architecture around her was under strain.

There is a word in Swahili, milele, that means forever, or eternity. It is a name that carries a certain kind of ambition. In Goma, in the middle of a conflict that had no clear end, Myriam Nabintu Marara was running a business that fed farmers, recycled waste, employed youth, and refused, with considerable evidence, to stop.