Magatte Wade is a young lady, born 80 kilometres south of Dakar, in a small town called m’bour in Senegal. she moved to Germany at around seven years old, where she attended school for the first time then after two years, moved to France where she completed both high school and business school and finally moved to San Francisco, where she kick-started her entrepreneurial career with an African-inspired beverage company called Adina World Beverages. This company was the first of its kind, selling African drinks all over the United States. The success of that company also changed the perception that almost all Americans had of Africa, being extremely under-developed and incapable of success.
Her passion for entrepreneurship and creating high-retail brands based on indigenous and diverse African resources lead her to the forming of her second company , a state of the art skin care product line based on Indegenous Senegalese ingredients and recipes called Tiossan. Her products are distributed via www.tiossan.com , a few high-end boutiques, and of course, Nordstrom. As the CEO of Tiossan, Magatte dedicates at least ten percent of Tiossan’s profits to the establishment of entrepreneurial schools in Senegal to develop the next generation of Senegalese geniuses.
Aside from being a super successful entrepreneur, Magette is a frequent speaker at business conferences and well-known college campuses including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT, Dartmouth, Brown, Wharton, etc. She also writes for the Guardian, The Huffington Post and Barron’s.
Magatte has defied the odds by being African, Muslim and female and making it in America. She serves as a role model for millions of Muslims, Africans, and Females all over the world. She has received numerous awards including one from “leading Woman in Wellness” from the Global SPA and Wellness Summit, the chief international organization that assembles leaders and futurists to positively influence and form the future of the global spa and wellness industries. In addition, she was recently included in Forbes’“20 Youngest Power Women in Africa” and tagged a Young Global Leader by the Davos Global Economic Forum. She has been also featured on the cover of Forbes magazine as the most positively influential francophone person.
With all these successes, one would think it doesn’t get better than this but it’s Magatte Wade we’re talking about guys and it certainly does. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Whole Planet Foundation, the private foundation of the Whole Foods Market. To add to that, she’s a member of the board of ASNAPP and the SEED Academy (Sports for Education and Economic Development), a private school in Senegal that develops young people academically and athletically so that they can attain NCAA basketball scholarships in the U.S.
