17 Apr 2017

While many young people are still competing for the limited employment opportunities around, 27-year-old Ms Lesedi Kgomo is busy making and selling bread on a daily basis to earn a living.

Ms Kgomo has settled so well in her vocation that once she started giving testimony about her project and the dividends it pays, she flowed like water along a steep slope.

 “This is how I live; mixing dough, baking and selling all kinds of bread every day to earn a penny and lead a dignified life,” she said in an interview with BOPA.

Supporting her testimony, all her customers say the young woman is succeeding despite being situated right at the centre of Francistown’s Monarch location shopping centre, where big and reputable supermarkets abound.

As the saying goes; ‘an early bird catches the fattest worm,’ so does Ms Kgomo, who starts her day as early as 5am with the necessary preparations such as dough making and tiding up of the work area.

Girly, as the young baker is commonly known to her everyday customers, has the right attitude that always motivates her to be ready to serve her customers as early as 7am, especially students, who never miss to pass by her kiosk on their way to school.

Ms Kgomo’s kiosk is also so strategically located at a bus stop that people who use buses stop over to grab a bun or two before they ride on to different areas.

Girly’s other market opportunity include catering for Ipelegeng workers

“The idea to serve my customers with fresh products helps me penetrate the market despite the fact that I operate in the centre of well-established and reputable supermarkets,” she said.

Ms Kgomo is not only into profit making, she understands the concept of healthy eating; as such she has decided to make baked bread instead of fat cakes to cut on the use of unhealthy oil.

She also uses brown flour so as to cater for the health conscious.

She has been in this business for a while and now she is working towards perfecting it.

“At the beginning I was using fire wood which made baking a long process; the other problem with firewood oven is that its temperature is not regulated, as such bread often got burnt; hence losses.

Nonetheless, Ms Kgomo withstood all these trials and today she uses advanced machinery for dough making and the electric oven, which can accommodate four large baking trays at once.

 With such machinery, she is now able to meet the demands of her customers. BOPA