Jinja woman into food processing

Meet Jinja woman who grows and adds value by processesing her farm produce. Maggie Katega grows mushrooms and makes wines which leave her home when they are ready for the market, writes Pauline Kairu

As she ushers me into her storehouse shortly after touring around her garden, it is hard to believe all the products that fill it come from this same one acre piece of land at the back of the family house.

Stacks of vessels sit in this store. I later discover they are filled with different varieties of wines which have fermented and are awaiting packaging and conveyance to different outlets.

The list of wines includes coffee, banana, tea, jack fruit, pawpaw, grape, orange, mango, mixed fruit and rozelle. Though she grew up in the plains of Kigezi in the western part of the country, Maggie Katega was never really a farm girl.

Born to a Dutch father and a Rwandese mother, she had quite the upbringing having to learn and hold out all different cultures. She went on to complete her post-secondary studies and join the job market as was expected of her. She practiced nursing for a few years before realising she was not cut out for medicine. This prompted her to move on to doing a secretarial course.

However, after working as a secretary for some time, she realised she was not happy there either. By then, she had been married and her family was expanding as she got her first babies. Her babies got sick regularly and she needed to give them all the due attention.
It is then that her affinity for nature started. She decided to quit her office job.

“I was spending most of my time at home and I often found myself tending to flowers, and fruits in our backyard. And that is when it occurred to me that I did not need to go back to work as a secretary or look for employment elsewhere for that matter.

“Besides, formal jobs were not paying as well as I would have wanted...I thought to myself, ‘what if I started processing the few products that were growing on my small garden?’” Ms Katega tells of her initial steps of a journey that has seen her almost become an expert in mushroom growing and honed her skill at value addition.

One day in church there was an announcement calling for any persons interested in processing to register for a course that was to take place in Mityana. Then she was only making pineapple, tea and coffee wines and was curious to learn how she could put her range of fruits to use.

That is when she stopped supplying her fruits most of which are exotic or grafted to food stores and major grocery chains like Uchumi. Now Ms Katega who also makes tomato sauce, jam and puree sauces as well as honey, has emerged to be one of the most noticeable small scale processors in Busoga.

She started growing mushrooms in 1985. “Then I did it in a very amateurish way because the people teaching us then were giving us half baked material. The results were clearly not good and I told myself I had to do whatever it took to get it right or I was going to give up.”

But she had discovered her special knack for mushrooms so she went on to approach a professor in Makerere University to learn the right way of growing mushrooms.
Once she had got it right she started training others who had been going about it the wrong way.

Her new found passion came in handy when her husband lost his job in 1986 and she had to fend for the family until 2003. “Women must learn to do simple things that can save the family in times of a financial crisis,” the mother of five who has tried her hand at crafts making and was at one time also a seams-stress holds.

That is the reason why aside from just producing her raw materials for the range of products she manufactures in her own kitchen, she started teaching others especially women, mushroom growing and wine making.

The lady now in her 60s moves around the country teaching organised women’s groups kitchen value addition and has been to as far as Rwanda. “We are getting old. We should not die with this knowledge.”