Age: 28

Origin: Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Based in: Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Education: Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Occupation: CEO & founder of Dalatek and Teodora Goods

Growing up in Uzbekistan in the 90s, Dildora Atadjanova spent a lot of her childhood accompanying her father while he worked as a dry fruit exporter. The difficulties her father faced as an exporter in newly independent Uzbekistan became so acute that he switched to working in the medical industry. Despite witnessing her father’s struggles, Atadjanova was still inspired to follow her father’s career.

She moved to Malaysia to study electrical engineering in 2013, but only a year later inflation in Uzbekistan, combined with the soaring dollar, meant that her family could no longer support her financially in her studies. Atadjanova did not want to return to Uzbekistan so soon, so she found work selling agricultural products in Malaysia. In 2017, she had to return to Uzbekistan to renew her visa and documents and was amazed to find herself in a completely different country.

The death in 2016 of Islam Karimov, who had ruled Uzbekistan since before the Soviet breakup, marked a dramatic change in direction. His successor, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, once a prime minister under Karimov, has made attracting foreign investors one of his top priorities in an increasingly ambitious plan to open Uzbekistan to the outside world. Mirziyoyev’s reform programme has focused on liberalising the foreign exchange market, modernising business practices and cutting down the legacy of Soviet-era bureaucracy. Atadjanova recalls that she gave up running a café during the Karimov era due to the need to comply with ridiculous requests such as feeding government officials for free.

Atadjanova was so impressed by the changes she saw in her country that she decided to stay and work for an agricultural company in Uzbekistan. She did not stay long in that company as she experienced harassment from her boss. When she quit, she had no ambitions to open her own company at all, it was the realisation that if she worked for another company, and there was a male boss, then history could repeat itself. Atadjanova felt her best way out of the situation was to stop seeking employment and start an entrepreneurial career instead.

In 2018, Atadjanova founded an agricultural export company, Teodora Goods. She made many mistakes in the first years and at one point had debts of $10,000. This was Atadjanova’s first major business shock, but she has now come to terms with the fact that debts have to be part of her business strategy. She believes her ambitious nature comes from her grandfather who died before she was born, but from family stories, she was told that he could not live without having his own business. During Soviet times, he built a workshop for the production of furniture and also made balloons. As entrepreneurship was a crime in the USSR, her grandfather was jailed for every business he created. Each time he was released from prison, he would simply start from scratch and build another successful business out of nothing.

With its temperate climate, cheap labour and abundant crops of fruit and vegetables, Uzbekistan should be an exporter’s dream. However, Atadjanova soon found that the goods she was trying to export were spoiled before they would arrive at supermarkets. At one point, 700 tonnes of persimmons and grapes she was exporting perished.  “I could see how much food wastage was happening, in Uzbekistan and in the whole world, in the export business.” Atadjanova knew that the processing, storage, and packaging of goods had to improve in order to end food wastage and that to improve the efficiency of her export company, she had to learn about the cold chain process, the logistics of how to get perishable goods from the field to the customer intact.

In 2019, with the support of USAID, Atadjanova joined farmers from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on a study tour of the Indian state of Maharashtra, known internationally for the production and export of table grapes. In February 2020, USAID’s Competitiveness, Trade and Jobs activity sponsored Atadjanova’s attendance at Gulfood, in Dubai, the world’s largest food and drinks trade exhibition. USAID also featured Teodora Goods in its Directory of Central Asian Horticulture Exporters. These experiences opened new possibilities for her business and Teodora Goods now exports to other Central Asian nations as well as to France, Korea, and Oman.

The outbreak of COVID-19 cut trade and disrupted Atadjanova’s export business, but this did not deter her from trying to fix the logistics of Uzbekistan’s agriculture sector. “I put my export practice on hold and focused on Dalatek, a new digital platform and on launching an algorithm-based system that maps product quality control steps through the cold chain.” In late 2020, Atadjanova founded Dalatek with IT entrepreneur Laziz Adkhamov and by December 2021, they boasted 1,200 users.

Dalatek aims to help farmers increase their sales. Atadjanova does not receive any revenue from the farmers as Dalatek is free for them to use to connect with exporters. For the players of the agricultural sector and the services that use it, banks and insurance companies, they will later have to pay for access. Atadjanova has also monetised the company by selling its market research, and through selling subscriptions and taking commissions on sales.

With the use of a Telegram bot, Dalatek connects farmers with exporters, cutting out the middlemen who reduce the profits of those growing the produce and only care about short-term gains. Atadjanova describes Dalatek as the Uber of the agricultural sector. If an exporter is looking for a specific product, say tomatoes, then they will look at the Dalatek system to see the list of farmers throughout the country selling tomatoes, what volume of tomatoes they have, how many hectares and the history of disease. The exporter and farmer who work together evaluate each other and assign a rating.

Atadjanova travels around Uzbekistan 350 days of the year making and overseeing deals and showing farmers how the Telegram bot and the cold chain process works. Dalatek solves the root of Uzbekistan’s agricultural exporting problem by connecting agribusiness with technology.

Atadjanova’s success has been cemented by her participation as a panellist at Uzbekistan’s first economic forum in September 2021. She was the only woman who participated in the roundtable “Fostering SMEs as a Jobs Creation & Economic Growth Engine.”

Quote: “The fewer opportunities and resources, the more freedom. They say when you’re at the bottom, the only way is up”

Sources: economist.com, eurasianet.org, youtube.com, usaidcentralasia.exposure.co, spot.uz, gazeta.uz