Alumni

Rafia Taskeen

Founder & Serial Entrepreneur

MSc 2023

Building possibilities, not just companies
A girl who was never expected to leave her hometown went to Glasgow, turned adversity into entrepreneurship, and is now using business to create opportunities for other people. Rafia Taskeen (Msc 2023) is an engineer, serial entrepreneur and cultural innovator building ventures at the intersection of technology, wellness, sustainability and female empowerment, and now a nominee for the University of Glasgow's World Changing Alumni Award. Here, in her own words, is her story.

"I started with £100.

That's not a metaphor , it's literally what I had when I began. I'd won it from a business case competition at university of Glasgow ASBS , and it became the seed for everything that followed. I built my first product from a student kitchen in Glasgow, using my mother's recipes, at a point in my life when almost nothing suggested that this was the path I was meant to take. I wasn't expected to leave my hometown, never mind build businesses across three continents. But I've learned that where you start doesn't have to decide where you end up , and that's really the whole philosophy behind everything I do.

From a kitchen table to a company
That first venture became Elaichi & Love, a Scotland-born South Asian wellness brand. Today it has more than 25 signature and innovative products and a patent-pending production process, and it's been recognised through the NatWest Entrepreneur Community and multiple innovation awards. I built it because I believe culturally rooted wellness deserves a place in the modern world, not just a footnote in it.

My engineering background then pulled me toward a bigger problem: food waste. Through Circular Kitchen Lab, I'm now developing food technology and AI solutions aimed at the waste and sustainability challenges across the entire food ecosystem. It's a very different scale of problem to the one I started with, but the instinct is the same , take an engineer's mindset and point it at something that actually matters.

I hold the UK Innovator Founder visa, which recognises innovation, scalability and economic contribution, and I was recognised by Scotland's First Minister, John Swinney, as an innovative businesswoman. Those milestones matter to me, not as trophies, but as proof that this route , starting with nothing, building slowly, refusing to separate commercial ambition from meaningful impact , actually works.

'I don't want to simply build companies. I want to build possibilities.'

Why I do this

None of this was ever just about business for me.

I focus on orphans because when my mother passed away, I was in their shoes , I know exactly what that loss does to a child's sense of what's possible. Through initiatives including the Feed an Orphan programme, our work has now reached tens of thousands of children across India, Africa and the UK.

I focus on women and girls because I come from a culture where a woman's education can be seen as a burden rather than a right, and I know intimately what it feels like to have your freedom and self-worth questioned before you've even had the chance to prove yourself. I've built a community of more than 11,000 people, with women and female founders at its heart, spaces designed so that a woman doesn't just attend, she starts to see herself as a leader, a founder, a decision-maker.

I focus on people facing health challenges because I've been one of them. I went through a severe case of pneumonia and was given seven days to live. That experience is the reason Elaichi & Love exists at all , it became my way of turning a health crisis into a platform for helping others navigate their own.

And I focus on children growing up without access to opportunity or education,
because I believe talent is everywhere, even when opportunity isn't.

'If you can change what a child believes is possible, you can change the trajectory of their life.'

Rooms where something can change
Alongside the businesses, I've built events and experiences that have brought together more than 2,000 attendees , founders, women, professionals, changemakers. I don't think of these as networking events. I think of them as rooms where something can change: a founder meets an investor, a young woman meets a mentor, someone who has been struggling with their circumstances suddenly realises their future isn't already written.

I've also had the privilege of contributing to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, speaking on female leadership and gender equality, and I've returned to judge international business case competitions of the same kind I once won as a student , which is a strange and wonderful thing, to sit on the other side of the table.

Why Glasgow University, still
University is where all of this actually started , not just the £100, but the belief that it was even possible for someone like me to build something at all. It's where I went from being a girl who wasn't expected to leave home to someone building across wellness, food technology, AI and education, with a community of 11,000 people behind her. I carry the University and city with me into every room I walk into now.

To the alumni community
If you take one thing from my story, let it be this: you don't need permission, capital, or a perfect starting point. You need to refuse to give up on the version of the future you can see, even when nobody else can see it yet.

I'm not sharing this story to be admired. I'm sharing it because somewhere in this alumni community is someone who feels exactly like I did , like the odds are against them, like their background has already decided their outcome. I want them to know it hasn't. If my journey does anything, I hope it reminds all of us that we are each capable of being world changers , not despite where we started, but because of it."

Social Media

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafia-taskeen-555682202/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elaichi_love/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61593231264129