Despite today’s competitive business environment, numerous female entrepreneurs have achieved incredible career success. Forget Shareka, a Zimbabwean agronomic engineer, a multi-award-winning entrepreneur & innovator in agricultural sciences, and a climate change advocate, is one of these extraordinary figures. Forget is renowned for her dedication to community development, environmental sustainability, sustainable food systems, her innovative efforts to minimize food waste, and her expert guidance to businesses and organizations, assisting them in optimizing profitability.
Co-founder at Chashi Foods
Forget is the co-founder and product development director at Chashi Foods, a well known Zimbabwean agro-processing company that transforms raw farm produce into packaged, market-ready products, supporting local farmers and boosting the economy. While pursuing her undergraduate degree in 2018, Forget founded Chashi Foods with the goals of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable income generation, improving food and nutrition security, and providing jobs for rural Zimbabwean women and youth.
Environmental Compliance Manager at Viberoptix
In addition to her business ventures, Forget, upon completing her master’s quickly, forged ahead to build a career in environment and sustainability, rising into a leadership role within four years in a foreign nation. She serves as Viberoptix’s Environmental Compliance Manager, demonstrating her extraordinary expertise in sustainability and environmental compliance across borders. Forget successfully transitioned from agriculture and food manufacturing into construction and telecommunications, demonstrating strong transferable skills and the business agility required in today’s 21st-century corporate landscape.
Women & Youth Empowerment Initiatives
Through Chashi Foods and LiHFA, Forget provided agribusiness training to over 1500 young and smallholder farmers in Costa Rica, Africa, and Zimbabwe, assisting them in achieving food and nutrition security during COVID-19. She co-authored the smart agriculture guide for Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) used to train more than 100,000 women and created 770 jobs for young women in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Ghana. She was selected to join Zimbabwe’s COMESA Federation of Women in Business and attended the SADC meeting to create trade policies and standards aimed at increasing women’s participation in business. In 2013, she was recognized as the most outstanding advocate in issues concerning reproductive health among young people with HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe.
Awards & Recognitions
Throughout her career, Forget has received numerous accolades, including the 2020 Best Young Entrepreneur Award, the 2021 Ellie Maxwell Award, the 2022 Best Female Entrepreneur Award, the 2023 Female Manager of the Year-Silver, the 2024 Being Edinburgh Award, and the Global Award for Women in Ag (agriculture) from Agritechnica. She also won the University of Edinburgh Business School’s 100-second pitch competition and was recognized as an edie 30 Under 30 future sustainability leader in 2024.
Academic Background
Forget has a strong academic background. She studied Agricultural Sciences at EARTH University of Costa Rica and earned a master’s degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the University of Edinburgh Business School. Also, she has diploma certificates in Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies from Harvard Business School (online) & Financial Innovations for Economic Development from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Receiving the prestigious MasterCard Foundation scholarship twice is one of her outstanding academic achievements.
Forget’s Journey to Becoming a Renowned Entrepreneur
Forget’s journey to becoming an accomplished agro-processing entrepreneur is incredibly motivating. She was raised by her late grandmother on a farm in the northern region of Zimbabwe, at Mushumbi Pools. Her love for sustainable farming, agribusiness, and resolving issues with the food system was sparked by her late grandmother’s guidance on her subsistence farm.
She dedicated her studies and expertise to addressing food systems, climate change and environmental challenges, inspired by her grandmother’s tenacity, forward-thinking attitude, and the difficulties smallholder farmers encounter on a daily basis in their agricultural pursuits. She faced numerous obstacles, such as limited access to education, while growing up in a female-headed agricultural family in a developing nation, but she never wavered.
Success comes to those who embrace challenges. Forget is a prime illustration of this. To become the woman she is today, she put forth a lot of effort and overcame numerous obstacles.