Tisya Mukuna

Tisya Mukuna is a Congolese entrepreneur and founder of Café La Kinoise, a coffee factory that is helping revive the coffee industry in Kinshasa.

Born in 1992 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, she moved to France with her family at the early age one where she lived and later studied for a Double Bachelor Degree in Management and English at the Université Paris Nanterre between 2011 - 2014.

After Tisya successfully furthered her studies at the IÉSEG School of Management , France , where she obtained a Master’s degree in Business, Management and Marketing , and bagged an MBA from Shanghai International Studies University ,China in 2016 , she decided to return and settle in Congo.

Following in her father’s footsteps who had earlier established a fish farming business, she also decided to venture into business after visiting Mont Ngafula, a municipality in the hilly southern area of Kinshasa where she took a risk and planted more than 1,000 Robusta coffee seedlings which she had monitored via a certified agronomist.

The harvest turned out to be a success, and in 2019, Tisya harvested three tonnes of coffee which served as a launch pad for a company she started and nicknamed "la Boite” which started serving coffee by February 2020; she also introduced mobile coffee carts in 2022 to the streets of Kinshasa to cater for the underserved market of low-income earners. 

Café La Kinoise , which is the winner of the COPA business plan competition organized in 2020 by the Congolese government, has a variety of products available in more than 11 supermarkets across the DRC.