Alumni News - Lauren Russell Nkuranga (’05)

Lauren Russell Nkuranga (’05) lives in Kigali, Rwanda with her husband artist Emmanuel Nkuranga and their two small children. She is the founder of GET IT, an e-commerce food distribution company whose mission is “to bring food security to East, West, and Central Africa.” We talked about the arc of Lauren’s journey from the Pacific Northwest to the landlocked republic nestled between the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania, her time at Overlake, Yale, and the Nike Foundation on her way to taking up capitalism as a tool for change.

How did GET IT start?

I started GET IT with just myself, $5,000, and an idea. I did the first 500 deliveries myself out of the back of my car, bringing groceries to houses.

We ended up getting a retail order from a restaurant when we introduced fruits and vegetables into our portfolio. And I went to the restaurant and said, "Isn't there a company that does this?" And they said, "No, everybody's got a guy that goes to the market and some people like their guy more than others." Because there's big open-air fruit and vegetable markets here. So that's what started us on the route of becoming a service distribution company. So fast forward to today and GET IT is the largest fresh food distributor in the country. We have 100 warehouse employees, we then work with 50 out-growers who employ anywhere between four and 200 people.

But then we also have our own proprietary farms where we grow ginger, turmeric, chili, and garlic for export to India and South Africa. We work with 400 farmers right now. We're on 40 hectares (about  80 acres). And we're now scaling up to 400 acres with a strategic partnership with a US-based company. And we're the largest distributor to hotels and restaurants. We serve all the major hotels, Marriott, Radisson, and the high-end safari lodges. But the majority of their food, fruits and vegetables, meat, dairy, seafood, dry goods, we serve the national airline. So it's pretty crazy when you're flying in the middle of the air and you got a lemon and you're like, I know exactly where this lemon came from.

In 2018, we hired a CEO. And then in 2020, raised our Series A funding—during the height of the pandemic. So over the last two years I have been able to transition out of the day-to-day management role at GET IT. I now serve on the board and I'm the largest shareholder, but it runs itself, which is actually really nice. As a founder, when you are used to doing everything yourself, it’s great to transition to having a strong team that runs daily operations and able to make decisions.

In 2019, I started the American Chamber of Commerce here in Rwanda. The American Chamber of Commerce is a global advocacy organization based out of DC. It’s the first foreign chamber registered in Rwanda. It represents American business interests and anyone who's American adjacent, both in terms of representations of the government from a policy perspective, but then also making connections to our members among one another, and then also just helping them do better business in Rwanda and then also in East Africa.

Today, I work for the Rwandan government with the Rwanda Development Board. I serve as the Chief Advisor to the Chairman & the CEO. We oversee all private sector development in the country.

Talk about your path to what you are doing now.

After Overlake I went to Yale University, where I majored in anthropology and political science, and then did all of the coursework for a master's in forestry, but realized that I actually didn't want to go into forestry as a career. I didn't stay to do a fifth year. After that I moved to LA and worked in communications and public relations for major foundations tackling social issues. I organized a big event with the Dalai Lama, and then was poached by the Nike Foundation. I moved up to Oregon to work at Nike headquarters for the Nike Foundation, which focuses on a thing called the Girl Effect, which is the idea that when you invest in adolescent girls in poverty, you stop poverty before it starts.

I originally got to Rwanda through the Nike Foundation. It was originally for a week, and that turned into three months and then that turned into six months and then two years. We were working in partnership with a UK-based governmental aid organization called DFID, which is their equivalent to USAID. Our project was called Girl Hub. This was in 2012. After two years with the Girl Effect and Nike Foundation I realized that ethical business is the best way to solve poverty, not corporate philanthropy.  So I left Nike to start GET IT.

What challenges have you met along the way?

I think about the book Heart of Darkness all the time because I live right next to Congo. And of course, reading the Heart of Darkness at Overlake, we had all the context around it. And it's really bizarre to live there. Because you read the Heart of Darkness and it doesn't really seem like a real place and I'm like, Congo is a very real place to me. I go to Congo. It’s a very real place. I think what's so interesting is, I still regularly take all of the tools that I gathered from a cross-over of things that Overlake offers to their students. And I find myself being able to feel very comfortable in not only understanding where, for example, Rwanda is today. When you're a student of history and culture, you not only understand why you are where you are today, but you understand where you're going to go in the future.

What did you bring with you from your Overlake experience?

The second semester of my junior year at Overlake, I was in at our sister school in Spain. I spent six months there. So I knew a little about what it is to live a global life. I still remember Marian Sugano giving me a pep talk not to learn French, but to learn Spanish because Spanish would be a lot more useful. And of course I have lived a decade in a Francophone country! (Laughs) Well, at least adjacent to a bunch of Francophone countries. We're half Francophone, half Anglophone here, but it's really funny to me that I don't use my Spanish at all. Dave Bennett taught a class on the modern Middle East my senior year, which then inspired me to take Arabic when I went to university. I think I always knew that I wanted to live a global life, but I couldn't have envisioned the life I have today.

I definitely think Overlake prepared me particularly well for understanding the world global context, not only from a history perspective. And I feel like I have a very, very strong global history background because of Overlake, but also through a literature perspective. Yesterday I was bringing up all of the magical realism that I learned in high school at the American Chamber of Commerce here and my colleagues from the European Chamber of Commerce brought up circular time! Being able to engage with that conversation with the woman who runs the European Business Chamber here - she's Danish - is wonderful. Just being able to reference that thing from a cultural perspective, from a linguistic perspective, from a current events perspective, I think that's something that Overlake prepared me for really well. I feel like even if I didn't know the context already because of Overlake classes, I was given the tools for understanding, and to be understood.