Primary Job Title Founder Primary Organization 
Planting Promise
Location Sierra Leone, Africa Regions Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Gender Male
LinkedIn View on LinkedIn
Rocco left school and spent a year as a commissioned officer in the British Army, after which he worked in Uganda and Zimbabwe. He then attended Cambridge University. Whilst at University he travelled to Sierra Leone. Struck by the coexistence of enormous opportunity and enormous need, he started Planting Promise, which runs businesses in farming
and food processing and using the profits to fund free, high quality schools for children with no other access to education. He ran it 2008 – 2015 when he handed it over to a new CEO. Hehas received awards from Vodafone, done a TedX talk, and received funding from some of the biggest corporates in Africa. Planting Promise now runs 3 schools, factories and food brands in Sierra Leone.
Whilst running Planting Promise and its businesses in agriculture, he became convinced of the huge social impact, as well as financial return, of commercial agricultural investment in West Africa. In 2011 he set up his first commercial ventures focusing on plantation crops, initially starting in Sierra Leone. He now has planted and manages over 2, 300 hectares of palm oil and rubber plantations in Sierra Leone, as well as commercial milling facilities buying fruits from smallholders and processing them into sustainable and high quality palm oil in Ghana. He is now looking at creating premium brands in the West which are sourced and made in Africa.
