22 Jul 2020

While Bazezuru women are known for dressing in all-white attire with matching head scarf, and walking around selling handmade crafts and different perishable food items to earn a living, 27-year-old  Esinah Onias has chosen a different path.

She is a Bachelor of Soil and Water Conservation Engineering graduate from Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BUAN), a qualification that  enabled her  to venture into a viable horticulture project, growing different types of herbs.

During a recent visit to Ms Onias project at BUAN, BOPA team found a space well decorated with a variety of herbs like wild rocket, parsley, oregano, fennel, dill, thyme, rosemary, chamomile, chives, mint and sage among others.

Donning an overrall, the young Zezuru woman exudes passion for farming.

Clearly this project is something to write home about, it was executed after an intense research.

“I was prompted by the country’s high import bill to try my luck in horticulture, if you look at the import bill since 2015, you will see that there is a business opportunity that one can tap into,” she said.

Ms Onias said the research she conducted gave her confidence, saying although the country had a satisfying level of per capita income, food security remained a challenge since the country relied mostly on imported goods.

Ms Onias said her research revealed that in 2015 the bill stood at P73.2 billion and this kept increasing.

“Efforts to eradicate hunger, transition to a sustainable food production system and healthy diets should not be the responsible of the government alone, hence I felt obliged to try my luck as an entrepreneur and play a role towards the attainment of food security’” she said .

She said though she was not yet producing on a very large scale, she was confident that the little she produced made a difference.

Currently she supplies some local supermarkets, restaurants and the fact that people are now watching their diet and other health issues, gives her another leg of sales.

“Of late a lot of people prefer to use herbs to flavour their meals and for other health reasons. Whenever I have no deliveries to make, I am happy that some individuals come personally to the garden and buy directly,”

Onias farms Pty Ltd started at Phase 4 in Gaborone as a backyard garden that she self-financed through her savings amounting to P2000.

She said upon completion of her degree in 2017, life outside the campus had to continue, there were bills to pay and other personal financial issues and starting up a backyard garden was the only option she had.

She started off with vegetables such as onions, green peppers, tomatoes, green leafy vegetables and some of them took long to ripen while others were seasonal.

As such she shifted to herbs since mostly only take six weeks to be ready for consumption and sales.

The zeal propelled her try her luck with the BUAN Agricprenuer program for some financial assistance and other related resources.

Agricprenuer program was developed by BUAN to equip its graduates with entrepreneurial skills that prepared them for employment in the private and public sector or self-employment.

The incubation program is coordinated by the Centre for In-service and Continuing Education (CICE) at BUAN in conjunction with Local Enterprise Authority (LEA).

Graduates are given free interest loan up to P100 000 payable over a period of 12 months.

Through these funds graduates are encouraged to start food production projects such as horticulture, broiler rearing, piggery,egg production and others so as to play a role towards local food production.

Ms Onias said she was given a P60 000 interest free loan to start up her project.

“The loan that I received helped me walk an extra mile pushing my project into reality, I was also given out a small land at the university for production, and I was also entitled to use water, transport, electricity and other resources to use freely,” she said,

She noted that her contract with the Agricprenuer program elapsed in June; however she was given a three month extension while she was still searching for land outside the university.

Ms Onias has not been spared from challenges that come along with climate change. However she has no plans to quit as the outcomes of the project outweigh the challenges.

The other challenge is that of shortage of land. “The demand for produce increased thus the need for more land,” she said.

Meanwhile, Ms Onias encouraged other youth to develop an interest towards food production, saying that would go a long way to assist the country achieve goals of self-sufficiency on food production.

She also underscored the need to conduct a market research before venturing into any project, saying most projects collapsed because of failure to research. ENDS