The Cobi-Jane Akinrele Story — The Fonio Whisperer Building Nigeria's Forgotten Grain Economy

By RIC Brands | Africa One Brand Series**

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There is a particular kind of courage required to build a business around a crop most of your own countrymen have never heard of. Cobi-Jane Akinrele found hers on the back of an Uber, heading into the chaos of Mile 12 market in Lagos, chasing a rumour about a grain called fonio.

That single trip — sparked by an article claiming fonio could be the next global superfood — would eventually pull a Cambridge-educated, British-born Nigerian away from the comfort of the UK and into the highlands of Plateau State, where she now runs Aké Collective, a social enterprise working with over 1,000 smallholder farmers across Nigeria's highland states of Plateau, Bauchi, and Taraba to build traceable, EUDR-compliant supply chains for soy, coffee, and fonio.

## From Cambridge to the Highlands

Akinrele's route into agribusiness was anything but conventional. Born and raised in the UK, she travelled to Nigeria nearly every other year during Christmas to visit her grandparents in Lagos — that was the extent of her exposure until she decided to do NYSC in 2018, serving in Lagos. What began as a mandatory year of national service became the seed of a life's work.

It was curiosity, not a pre-formed passion for farming, that pulled her in. She stumbled on an article hailing fonio as the next big global superfood — one with the potential to address food insecurity because of its drought resistance and rich vitamin profile — and went looking for it in Nigeria, eventually tracking it down at Mile 12 market. She found it expensive and hard to source, a signal not of scarcity in the ground, but of scarcity in the supply chain. That gap became the business.

Her family's own agricultural roots gave her a head start in thinking like a trader: her father runs a cassava farm in Ogbomoso, and a close family friend grows and processes cassava in Iseyin — a grounding in smallholder economics she would later carry north into fonio country.

## Building Aké Collective

What Akinrele built is deliberately more than a commodity trading house. Aké Collective's mission is to share the nutritious power of African superfoods with the world while empowering women farmers in Nigeria, built around three pillars: supporting women farmers through fair, meaningful partnerships, helping people enjoy nutritious, gluten-free foods, and building healthier communities.

The scale is real. Aké Collective now supports over 1,000 women farmers in Northern Nigeria who grow its fonio. And the products are engineered for a modern wellness market — vegan protein, sustainable nutrition, and immune-boosting benefits for active, health-conscious consumers, with fonio prized for its lightness, digestibility, and its ability to deliver steady energy without sugar spikes.

Akinrele has been explicit about why she leans into fonio and other "women's crops" rather than the commodities men traditionally dominate. Women make up 70% of Nigeria's agricultural workforce and are responsible for 80% of food production, yet historically hold little power over how that labour is valued. At Aké Collective, the focus on women's crops isn't about romanticising subsistence farming — it's about giving women the freedom to lead and earn on their own terms. These crops may not move in large volumes, but they hold real power, because fonio isn't something men typically grow at scale, which opens new ground for women traders.

## A Grain Worth Fighting For

Akinrele has become one of Nigeria's most consistent public voices for fonio as a food-security and public-health solution, not just a boutique export. In a 2024 awareness campaign, Aké Collective distributed 1,200 sample bags — 600 bags of grain and 600 of flour — to boost public acceptance of fonio as an alternate diet option in Nigeria. Her pitch has consistently combined national economics with personal health: fonio's high fibre content helps regulate blood sugar and supports digestive health, it is rich in protein for sustained energy, its gluten-free nature suits those with gluten sensitivity or celiac disease, and it carries essential minerals like iron, magnesium, and potassium. She has framed fonio as holding immense potential for Nigeria's economy — a resilient, highly nutritious crop capable of enhancing food security, creating agricultural jobs, and stimulating rural development.

She has been just as candid about the cultural stakes of the work: the crops Aké Collective focuses on are underserved, and without deliberate work to cultivate, share, and preserve them, real cultural heritage risks being lost. Her operating philosophy in Plateau's farming communities is community-first — paying farmers fairly and helping them open bank accounts, register for national identity numbers, and build basic financial literacy.

## Nigerian Coffee: The Next Frontier

Fonio was the entry point, but Akinrele's ambitions have expanded into one of Nigeria's most under-exploited value chains — coffee. Her diagnosis of Nigeria's coffee failure is blunt: Nigeria has always grown coffee; the question was never whether the land or climate were right, it's why the country has failed to capitalise on them. The numbers are damning — coffee accounts for just 2.3% of non-alcoholic drinks consumed domestically, Nigeria imports significant volumes even to meet that modest demand from neighbouring countries, China, and Ivorian processors, and in the first nine months of 2024 Nigeria recorded zero coffee exports — even as exports rose across the rest of the continent.

Rather than treating this as an agricultural failure, Akinrele frames it as an institutional one: over 90% of small-scale coffee farmers cite poor pricing and lack of market information as the reason they've reduced or abandoned production, and there is nothing about Cameroonian coffee that Nigerian coffee cannot match — the deficit is institutional, not agricultural. Her prescription centres on post-harvest infrastructure: farmers currently dry coffee berries with the fruit coat still on, which depresses quality and causes rejection at European ports, and investment in wet-processing mills and farmer training could shift Nigerian beans from rejection-grade to premium-grade.

It's a natural extension of the traceable, EUDR-compliant supply chain work she has already built for fonio and soy — and it positions Aké Collective, and Akinrele personally, as a serious builder in Nigeria's nascent specialty coffee movement, not merely a commentator on it.

## The Woman Behind the Movement

Akinrele doesn't romanticise the difficulty of the ground she's chosen. Operating as a British-Nigerian woman in Northern Nigeria's business culture has required constant recalibration. The North runs on a trust economy, where people have at times declined to work with her simply because they didn't know her or she hadn't been formally introduced by someone they trusted, compounded by gendered expectations that don't always fit the mould colleagues and employees expect from a woman trader operating at her scale.

Her response has been to lead with soft power, tempered by firmness when needed — sweet but ready to be strict and firm when required, especially running a business in Nigeria's harsh operating environment, leaning on soft power because she works primarily with women, where coming into conversations too forcefully risks discouraging other women from working with her. She credits her staying power to a simple internal metric: her ability to cope with change, uncertainty, and failure while still protecting her own wellbeing.

Her recent public writing has turned unflinchingly toward the operational realities most investors never see. Five years of running an agribusiness through Plateau's slow-motion exodus has taught her about a risk premium investors haven't priced in, even as the state government has moved to respond — a record N40 billion collected in internal revenue in 2025 against a 2026 target of N65 billion, and a N4 billion single-digit-interest lending facility signed with the Bank of Industry aimed at small businesses. Her verdict stays grounded in local trust rather than headline policy: traders won't use a road until they trust it, and businesses stay or leave based on whether their staff sleep through the night, not the interest rate.

## Why Akinrele Matters to Africa's Agribusiness Future

Cobi-Jane Akinrele represents a rare hybrid in African agribusiness: an operator who moved from curiosity to commodity to campaign, and who understands that reviving a forgotten grain or a collapsed coffee sector is never purely an agronomic problem — it is a trust problem, a financing problem, and a storytelling problem all at once. Her insistence on traceability, EUDR compliance, and women-led supply chains puts Aké Collective ahead of a regulatory curve that most Nigerian agri-exporters have not yet reckoned with. And her willingness to diagnose Nigeria's coffee failure as institutional, not agricultural, is exactly the kind of clear-eyed sector leadership that unlocks investor confidence.

From a Mile 12 Uber ride to a movement spanning three highland states, two under-leveraged crops, and a growing public platform, Akinrele is doing the patient work of proving that Africa's most overlooked crops are not liabilities waiting to be explained away, but assets waiting to be built.

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