Dr. Wambugu was born in a continent where more than 5,000 people die everyday from chronic malnutrition and about 30 million pre-school children are undernourished. She was raised on a small farm in Nyeri, just outside Nairobi, Kenya where her family grew sweet potatoes for subsistence. Working hand in hand with her family, Dr. Wambugu observed the damage caused by disease and pests which ravaged their meager crops.
 
She remembers her mother always trying to look for ways to increase production as they didn't have chemicals and she'd use things like ashes from burned wood and various concoctions to control insects. When Wambugu talks of hunger, she knows how it feels going for a day without eating, which she experienced often when she was growing up.
 
Having no resources and overcoming all odds, Wambugu excelled in school and her mother had to sell their only cow in order to fund Wambugu's secondary education. Inspired by her mother, in 1975 Wambugu joined the University of Nairobi, Kenya, where three years later she obtained a B.Sc. degree in botany and zoology. Upon graduation, she joined the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI). She later received a scholarship from the United States for International Development (USAID) to continue with her postdoctoral work on genetically modified sweet potato in the USA.
 
On returning to Kenya, she established the African office of the International Service of Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). The projects that she launched during her tenure a director of the ISAAA stimulated her desire to extend the benefits of science and technology to more of Africa’s people. A dream to help Africa’s poor to live in freedom from hunger, malnutrition and poverty through the application of science and technology begun to stir within her.
 
It was in January 2002 that Dr. Wambugu’s dream took a big step toward becoming a reality when Africa Harvest was born.