“The year 2002 was the hardest of our lives,” Cecilia Kapinga recalls. Her oldest daughter was sick and needed an operation that cost the family their entire annual income. To allow their daughter to finish high school, Cecilia and her husband Filoteus were forced to sell off all their livestock,…
Baby corn, beans, zucchini and sugar snap peas sprout on a farm in the mountains of Swaziland. But there’s much more than produce growing here. Sdemane Farming’s contract to supply a major South African supermarket chain is sowing hope for a brighter future in this impoverished community. When Themba Dlamini…
For 17-year-old Percy Shongwe and his two younger siblings, honey is a ticket to an education. They supply Swaziland’s Eswatini Kitchen with honey from their more than 50 beehives. Beekeeping and harvesting require only about 60 hours of work per year but give Percy and his siblings the opportunity…
For more than 30 years, Specioza Kakweezi has grown the plantain-like banana known as matooke on her one-acre farm in the hills of southwestern Uganda. Specioza, a widow, once grew matooke simply to feed her family. Today, she has turned her farm into a profitable business – and a…
Henry Gaga is a Food Technology Specialist with TechnoServe in Malawi and shares his insight into food processing in Malawi.
Like all of TechnoServe’s business plan competitions, Africa’s first Believe Begin Become, held in 2006, was the work of many partners. More than 70 supporters— ranging from Ghanaian academics and businesses to international corporations— contributed money, products or services. This ensured that by the time Joseph Tackie took first prize…
Using the business skills she learned through Young Women in Enterprise, 24-year-old Cecilia Katungwa (left) launched a a shop selling knitted goods. TechnoServe recently received a new grant from the Nike Foundation to continue an initiative to economically and socially empower young women in Kenya through 2012. The Young…
While working in an office job in Pretoria, South Africa, Sindi Mbambo recognized an opportunity to help her community live a healthier lifestyle. Sindi noticed her colleagues were too busy or too sick to prepare nutritious food, and were settling instead for quick, insalubrious meals. So she started peeling…
Isaac Bohulu’s idea for a natural medicine business was literally rooted in his backyard. The pharmacist from Accra, Ghana used extracts from a large Neem tree behind his house to create Neemfresh, an herbal mouthwash. After entering his idea to produce a commercial version of this mouthwash in TechnoServe’s…
Gerald and Rosemary Muthomi grew up in poor farming families on the foothills of Mt. Kenya. Determined to improve people's lives, they became government agricultural advisors. But they soon realized that it wasn't enough for small-scale farmers to grow more produce; they also needed opportunities to sell it to…
