The woman who looked at cassava and saw a factory

Oluyemisi Iranloye is proving that Nigeria’s most abundant crop is not just food. It is the foundation of an industrial economy.

Every morning, before the first truck arrives at the gates of Psaltry International’s factory in rural Oyo State, thousands of cassava roots are already on their way.

They come from villages scattered across an 80-kilometre radius. Farmers harvest before sunrise because cassava is impatient. Unlike cocoa or maize, it begins to deteriorate within days of leaving the ground. Every hour counts. Every delay reduces value.

For generations, this urgency trapped Nigeria’s cassava economy.

Farmers harvested, sold quickly to local traders and moved on to the next planting season. The roots became garri, fufu or lafun. Millions were fed, but little industrial wealth was created. Nigeria remained the world’s largest cassava producer while importing many of the industrial ingredients that cassava itself could produce.

To most people, cassava was food. To Oluyemisi Iranloye, it was chemistry. That single insight has transformed not only a crop, but an entire rural economy.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Nigeria produces more cassava than any country in the world, harvesting well over 60 million tonnes annually. Yet for decades, less than a fraction entered industrial processing. Most was consumed domestically, leaving manufacturers to import starches, sweeteners and industrial additives that could have been produced locally.

Iranloye believed the problem was never production. It was destination.

“If farmers have nowhere to sell beyond food markets, agriculture becomes subsistence,” she has often argued in speeches and interviews. “When factories stand beside farms, agriculture becomes industry.”

That philosophy became the foundation of Psaltry International Company Limited.

Founded in 2005, the company began with a deceptively simple ambition: create reliable industrial demand for cassava grown by rural farmers. Instead of exporting raw crops or leaving them for food markets alone, Psaltry would convert cassava into high-quality starch for food manufacturers. Over time, it expanded into pharmaceutical-grade starch, high-quality cassava flour, glucose syrup, ethanol and sorbitol, products used in toothpaste, pharmaceuticals, confectionery, beverages and processed foods.

That evolution reflects a lesson economists have repeated for decades. Countries rarely become prosperous by growing more crops. They become prosperous by processing them. The difference is profound.

A tonne of fresh cassava has limited value and a very short shelf life. Once transformed into industrial starch, sorbitol or pharmaceutical ingredients, its market expands dramatically. The same root begins to serve breweries, food processors, pharmaceutical companies, paper manufacturers and cosmetics producers. Each additional processing stage creates more jobs, more technical skills, more logistics activity and higher export potential.

Industrialisation, in other words, begins long before a product reaches a supermarket shelf. It begins inside the factory. Iranloye understands this perhaps better than anyone.

Her company now works with more than 5,000 smallholder farmers through an out-grower model, providing them with a dependable market rather than leaving them vulnerable to fluctuating commodity prices. Industry organisations estimate that the broader ecosystem supports tens of thousands of livelihoods directly and indirectly across farming, transportation, aggregation and processing.

The transformation extends beyond purchasing crops. It changes incentives.

When farmers know a factory will consistently buy cassava meeting defined quality standards, they invest more confidently in improved planting materials, better agronomic practices and higher yields. Banks become more willing to lend. Transporters secure predictable contracts. Rural communities begin to see agriculture as a commercial enterprise rather than merely a means of survival.

That multiplier effect explains why development economists increasingly view agro-processing as one of Africa’s most powerful tools for inclusive growth.

The journey, however, has been anything but straightforward.

Stanford Graduate School of Business devoted an entire case study to Psaltry, not because of cassava itself, but because of the infrastructure challenges surrounding its processing. Reliable electricity, industrial water supply and rural logistics proved almost as important as the factory. Iranloye had to weigh investments in independent power generation, water systems and community infrastructure – costs many manufacturers in advanced economies seldom confront.

Those constraints illustrate a broader truth about African industrialisation. Building a factory is rarely enough. Manufacturers often find themselves building parts of the ecosystem around it.

Yet perhaps the company’s most symbolic achievement came in 2022 with the commissioning of Africa’s first cassava-based sorbitol factory. Sorbitol is a key ingredient in toothpaste, pharmaceuticals and confectionery. Before then, Nigerian manufacturers largely depended on imports despite abundant domestic cassava supplies. The new facility, developed with financing support and anchored by local industrial demand, demonstrated that an imported industrial chemical could be replaced with one made from Nigerian farms. The project was designed to produce about 24 tonnes of cassava-based sorbitol daily while creating an estimated 25,000 direct and indirect jobs and expanding opportunities for around 10,000 rural farming households. That milestone matters for reasons extending far beyond cassava.

Every tonne of sorbitol produced locally reduces import dependence, conserves foreign exchange and strengthens domestic manufacturing. It also creates a new layer of industrial capability – one that encourages multinational manufacturers to source more inputs within Nigeria rather than overseas.

This is precisely the kind of industrial deepening countries such as Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil pursued decades ago. They did not become agricultural powerhouses simply because they harvested more.

They became industrial economies because they processed more. Nigeria now has an opportunity to do the same.

Cassava alone has more than 200 industrial applications, ranging from food ingredients and adhesives to biodegradable packaging, pharmaceuticals, sweeteners, textiles and biofuels. Yet much of this potential remains untapped. Expanding processing capacity would not only increase rural incomes but also reduce dependence on imported industrial inputs while creating export opportunities under the African Continental Free Trade Area.

For Go Local, the lesson is unmistakable. Industrial policy should begin where Nigeria already enjoys comparative advantage.

The country does not need to discover a new crop. It needs to discover new uses for the crops it already grows in abundance. Oluyemisi Iranloye’s story is therefore not simply about entrepreneurship. It is about changing the direction of an economy.

She looked at the same cassava millions of Nigerians saw every day and asked a different question. Not what can people eat? But what can industry make?

That shift – from consumption to production, from harvest to manufacturing, from commodities to industrial inputs – is where national prosperity is built.

Factories do not replace farms. They complete them. And in a quiet corner of Oyo State, where trucks arrive every morning carrying fresh cassava from surrounding villages, that future is already taking shape – one root, one farmer and one production line at a time.