Social Entrepreneur & Architect.
Reel Gardening founder.
She has innovated the home food cultivation sector. Comprising a simple colour-coded system of embedded seed tape, her patented Garden in a Box has revolutionised how family nutrition is approached while providing an estimated 48,100 households with food security. “When I embarked on this path there were very few female entrepreneurs to mentor me. Today, as one of those women, I hope to inspire others at the start of their journey,” she says. Claire is an innovative thinker and an entrepreneur at heart. She can look at processes and products and see a simpler, better method of getting the job done. This was the case when Claire encountered the process of vegetable gardening at the age of 16 and subsequently, she invented and patented a new process for planting seeds known today as Reel Gardening.
Using this innovation, Claire created Reel Life which is the non-profit arm of Reel Gardening. The focus of the Reel organisation is Agri-education and complimentary products as a critical tool to create systemic change in the quest for food abundance. The organisation has been actively involved in the agricultural space since inception in 2009 and has been recognized as one of Africa’s Leading Innovators. The Reel Organisation strategically partnered with the Department of Education to create approved educational materials which are combined with the organisations practical grow kits to enable gardens to be used as teaching tools for early childhood development, driving systemic change in the food and health education space.
Claire also encountered the logistical poverty disabling the future workforce of South Africa and created the Siyaphambili Pre-Paid Taxi App in direct response to this social crisis. Claire is a regular speaker on social entrepreneurship at both the Wits Business School and the Gordon Institute of Business Science and is the current Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman of the Year.
