 When most Americans think about Ethiopia, they think of an endless charity case. A country steeped in famine. A place that's been as poor for as long as anyone can remember and will always be so. But Ethiopia has a secret. It's the grain teff. It's been grown in Ethiopia for thousands of years. It's considered the country's national treasure. It goes into the country's local bread in Jira. And there's going to be massive demand for this super food because it's healthy, packed with protein, high in fiber, gluten free, and tastes great. It tastes way better than quinoa. So why haven't you heard of this super grain? Well, it's grown exclusively in Ethiopia and the country's previous military regime had isolated the country from the rest of the world. But that's all changing. The current government is opening up to the world and investment is pouring in. The country is growing faster than it's ever grown before. Teff production is on the rise. And more importantly, for the first time in 10 years, Ethiopia will export teff flour in 2016. So why do I care about teff? Well, I really care about what we can do with teff. And that's social change. I've been around social change my whole life, from my mother, who was a Head Start teacher, to my father, who worked at the World Bank. He'd tell me stories about how his team had helped deploy loans to developing countries and how they ignited growth in corners of the world by helping spark new businesses. I was fascinated by these stories and wanted to investigate grassroots social change myself firsthand. So I went to Bangladesh to work for a microfinance institution. And there I got to hear borrowers' stories with my own ears. In rural Bangladesh, in a village 10 hours from the capital, I heard a story from a woman named Reka. Reka got married at a young age, never held a job, and had tons of kids. She had no confidence, no hope, and no opportunity. But one day she joined a village lending organization. And there she got a small loan to buy a couple chickens, and then she sold those eggs at the local farmer's market. And soon her business was growing and growing. She got a bigger loan and then became a chicken farmer. She became the biggest chicken farmer in her area. All the women started looking up to her in her neighborhood and she got elected to the city council. It was amazing. It was the first time I heard a story of grassroots social change really impacting individuals in a powerful and meaningful way. I was hooked. So I went to Kenya. I was so curious about East Africa because three generations of my mother's family had lived in Tanzania and Kenya. So I moved to rural Western Kenya to work on drinking water safety projects. And I absolutely loved the culture in East Africa. I loved getting to know people in the community. And as I did, I learned about the people who were my neighbors and they were farmers. And I realized that to really improve the lives of my neighbors, I had to learn something about agriculture. So from there, I joined the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency. In Ethiopia, I got to meet some of the country's 6 million teff farmers, one of whom was a woman named Tigist. In the local language, Amharic, her name means patience. But she's been waiting for change for too long. She lives in a small village in the southern Ethiopian Rift Valley near a town called Shashmeni. Her husband passed away years ago because her family couldn't afford medical treatment for him. She's got a few kids who are school age. Her family has been farming teff for generations. But she has never been able to put food on the table year-round. At harvest, she tends to sell her grain to middlemen who offer her cash immediately but unfair prices. When she runs out of food, she often borrows food from her neighbors or from family members. But there are days when her family goes hungry. All of that changed on one project I worked on in Ethiopia. The very first thing we did was line up a buyer for Tigist grain. It was a bread manufacturer in the Addis, the capital. This buyer offered Tigist fair prices for her grain, which were 25% higher than the prices she was getting from middlemen. And because she had a buyer, we were able to invest in Tigist's on-farm production. So that meant seeds, fertilizer, and planting practices. We helped her get access to better seeds that were higher yielding rather than reusing old seeds that were less productive. Then we got our access to fertilizers, which she couldn't afford before. And finally, we helped her change the way she planted. So most farmers in Ethiopia grab a handful of teff grain and broadcast the seed across the field. But that leads to a concentration of the seeds in certain patches. And as a result, there's more competition among the seeds that the plants actually grow. But by helping her plant and rose with fewer seeds, there was less competition and her harvest doubled. So this combination of a 25% higher price plus a doubling of her harvest tripled Tigist's profits. With this extra money, she was able to feed her family around, pay for medicines when her children fell sick, and send her kids to school, something she had no chance to do. And that's when the light bulb went off. I realized I was going to start Love Grain, a food company to improve the lives of millions of farmers just like Tigist. We decided on the name Love Grain because teff is from a family of plants called Love Grasses. To learn how to launch a business, I came back to the U.S. and started an MBA program. During my business school program, I met some classmates who were gluten-free, one of whom was a woman named Shareen. Shareen is a high-powered, very busy, successful woman who really has time to search out for new gluten-free options. One day she ate a product of gluten in it without realizing, and it made her sick. She ended up at the hospital. So Shareen explained to me that eating gluten-free is like eating empty calories. Most days she's eating protein bars with more sugar than protein. This is when I had realized I had found a customer who would pay a premium for Tigist's grain. So with that insight in mind, I pulled together a few business school classmates and we wrote a business plan. Our advisors didn't believe we could actually sell teff to Americans. So with that challenge in mind, we decided to make a teff-based pancake mix because two doesn't love brunch. The product did phenomenal. We were selling online and in stores in Boston, and soon we were selling out because retailers like Whole Foods and Price Chopper were clamoring to get their hands on the product. Today we're sold out, but we're working on creating a healthy teff chip to bring teff into people's daily lives. By taking teff into the mainstream, we can help create a global market for Ethiopia's 6 million teff farmers. Together, we can satisfy the huge demand for gluten-free and health foods and improve the lives of millions of farmers just like Tigist.