Lottie’s passion for working with the rural poor using business approaches stems from his seven years of cooperative development work at all levels with the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives early on in his career. He later joined the private sector, working for a large multi-product, agro-processing company where he served for ten years, seven at the head of sales and marketing. He has also worked as Market Development Manager—Zambia for Valid Nutrition (VN), a UK-based charity operating as a social enterprise to market regionally manufactured nutrition products to the malnourished. Lottie joined iDE in 2011 as Rural Marketing and Supply Chain Coordinator under the Rural Prosperity Initiative phase-two project and quickly rose to become Program Director in 2014. Using market-based approaches, Lottie is leading the iDE Zambia field team to innovatively build and employ iDE’s Farm Business Advisor model as a vehicle for reaching out to the rural poor and sustainably unlocking the nation’s smallholder agriculture potential.

Read about iDE in Zambia.