Valérie Issumo

About Valérie Issumo

With a multicultural identity, having a father from Central Africa and a mother from Europe, Valérie Issumo lived in Congo-Kinshasa until she was 18. After completing her university studies in economics in Brussels, she became the recipient of the Minister of Foreign Trade Award in 1994. Five years later, following an MBA completed during her first managerial position as a trader in Antwerp for the Belgian-English group Sopex/Sucre Export, she worked in Uruguay in the cocoa derivatives sector. However, curious to learn more about the cocoa industry, she worked throughout Africa as a roving sourcing trader for a leading English group in Côte d’Ivoire.

With her knowledge of the futures market, her sense of initiative, and in search of a new challenge, she joined a newly established company in Geneva created by rice traders to set up an international sugar trading division. This experience of 8 and a half years at Novel Commodities and with her former shareholder Bauche SA inspired her, at the age of 39, to leverage her network and knowledge for disadvantaged populations. For this passionate scuba diver, yoga enthusiast, and beekeeper, her platform Prana Sustainable Water aims to finance water distribution or sanitation infrastructure, new technologies for better water usage, limited free access to drinking water for the poor, and the conservation of nature through an ethical water scholarship that will negotiate on the futures market licenses, allocations, volumes of water sold internationally, ethical water credits according to certain voluntary approaches of companies that adhere to the principle of corporate social responsibility, as well as virtual water based on the water footprint of certain products that draw water directly from the public good and/or pollute public waters.