Impressed by her determined mother, who struggled to provide her children with an education, Atsede Solomon Retta quickly became a very competitive student. After obtaining a diploma in agriculture, she decided to pursue a BSc in plant sciences at Alemaya University of Agriculture. “Actually, the government decided what I should study, but very soon, plant sciences really interested me,” she admits. “When I got to college, I did not even know some of the crops and I had had nothing to do with livestock ever before.” Upon graduation, she joined a commercial tea packing and marketing enterprise in Addis Ababa.