BRIDGING THE INNOVATION GAP FOR UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES

This series of articles showcases our 2025 Impact Awardees. The Impact Awards are dedicated to former Cartier Women's Initiative Fellows who have achieved extraordinary impact. Each of these nine exceptional women impact entrepreneurs has an inspiring story to tell about her journey to success.

This is the story of Jackie Stenson, a 2014 fellow and 2025 Impact Awardee.

“Frustration is a powerful driving force!” laughs Jackie Stenson. She is recalling the 24 months she spent as a newly graduated engineer hitchhiking across sub-Saharan Africa equipped with nothing more than a small backpack and big dreams. This was no extended gap-year. Instead, the budding entrepreneur was putting her fledgling skills into action, visiting low-income agricultural communities to find out how she could design affordable, energy-efficient farming equipment that would help them lift their meagre incomes.

Yet from the highlands of Ethiopia to the bushvelds of South Africa, the more miles she covered, the more she realized with growing exasperation the futility of her mission. Because the real issue wasn’t a lack of innovative equipment; the real issue was that the equipment that did exist simply wasn’t reaching the people who needed it.

And so, after a chance encounter with her soon-to-be business partner Diana Jue, who shared similar experiences from her own post-university travels in South Asia, this self-declared believer in “the power of crazy ideas” harnessed that frustration and turned it into Essmart.

Shortening miles, building trust, amplifying rural voices

Essmart was established in 2012 in India, where it continues to operate today. Jackie explains that the decision to set up there was based on the fact that many of the technologies needed by rural communities are already available in major Indian cities, avoiding the need for imports.

The company addresses the knotty problem of so-called “last-mile delivery.” This is where distribution of essential products to rural communities is hopelessly unreliable due to challenges around distance and access – an issue exacerbated by local shopkeepers being too poor, and consequently too risk-averse to stock goods they aren’t confident will sell immediately, or that might break without quick access to servicing or spare parts.

Essmart’s solution is simple but powerful. It creates trust by curating a carefully researched inventory of goods it knows will serve its target communities and supplies them directly to rural retailers. Suddenly that much-needed mobile phone-operated water pump or solar-powered lantern is no longer stuck in a store or warehouse hundreds of miles away – instead it’s available from a trusted local trader, who has themself gained a source of guaranteed income.

In this way, Essmart doesn’t only close distance gaps; it also builds a critical communications bridge between customer and supplier. “By engaging our shop owners and end users on equipment requirements we enable suppliers to design products that incorporate rural customers’ voices, meet their needs and, consequently, have a higher likelihood of creating impact.”

Nurturing positive agents of change

In fact the beauty of the Essmart model is that it has everybody’s best interests at heart, from the smallholder farmer lacking livelihood-generating equipment to the rural retailer struggling with untested or faulty stock. For example, during market research for Essmart Jackie recalls numerous encounters with shop-owners stuck with damaged goods they could neither sell nor repair. “It was both wasteful and also really frustrating for those small traders,” she says.

To address this, Essmart only offers products with after-sales service, and facilitates the maintenance agreements that enable retailers to purchase stock in the confidence that neither their profit margins nor their reputations are at stake. “Many of these retailers have a key role to play in their communities,” Jackie points out. “By taking the risk out of products, we provide the guarantees that shop-owners need to earn customer trust and be positive agents of change in their communities.”

Impact for people and planet

Essmart’s impact to date has been stunning. Since the business’s launch in 2012, more than 1.4 million people have benefited from over 330k livelihood-generating technology products, such as efficient agricultural tools and energy-saving cooking appliances, saving 101 million kilograms of CO2 emissions in the process.

Meanwhile, more than 5,000 rural retailers have been able to distribute life-improving products, enhancing their earnings by on average 20%, while becoming trusted lynchpins in their communities.

That includes retailers like Balaji, who owns an agriculture shop in a small town near Davanagere, in the lush green uplands of southern India. Until he was visited by an Essmart sales rep in 2019, Balaji mostly sold low-return merchandise such as seeds and fertilizers. Now, with access to the Essmart catalogue, he stocks higher-profit products like sprayers, as well as prestige goods such as cookware, enabling him to boost his income and improve his entire family’s prospects.

Balaji’s story is just one embodiment of Jackie’s ultimate vision of “helping those in need to grow their businesses and livelihoods so that they can take the next steps towards their dreams.”

Proof, if it were needed, that frustration harnessed purposefully has the power to transform lives.