Millicent Okumu has a plan, and she will tell you exactly what it is, including the part where she hands the keys over to someone else. The Kenyan entrepreneur co-founded Agriflex, an agricultural business that sells farm inputs and deploys spraying drones, and she already knows where she wants it to be in a decade: operating across at least five African countries, sustainably profitable, and running without her in the top seat. She sees herself stepping into an advisory role by then. For now though, the company follows her everywhere, including family gatherings where unfinished business has a way of showing up uninvited.
What makes her story interesting is that agriculture was never the plan. Her father was a civil servant who also farmed, raised cattle, and grew enough food to support relatives well beyond his own household. She was close to him, but the farm itself did not pull her in. She sidestepped it entirely through school and university, until a logistics role at iProcure in 2017 brought her back around to the sector she had been quietly avoiding.
Now she is embedded in it, selling inputs, putting drones to work in the field, and sitting with farmers who push back on technology that looks good on paper but does not solve their actual problems. That feedback has cost her. She has slowed down timelines and walked away from investors because of it. "We are in 2026," she says. "We are no longer in 2006." She is impatient, but she has become very selective about what progress actually means, and who it is really for.
That tension, between urgency and patience, between the girl who avoided the farm and the woman building a business across it, is exactly where this conversation begins.
Originally published by TechCabal.