Mbaziira awarded for adding value to milk

Born in a simple cattle -keeping family, she had always treasured farming, it was only when disaster struck, that she turned to it to fend for her household.

“After the demise of my husband, Cpt Jimmy Mbaziira, in 2003, the number responsibilities got too many for the shop to continue sustaining us. It was then, in 2007, that I resorted to commercial farming,” she shares.

The start

Starting with the 30 cows she had at the time, a gift given to them on their wedding day, Mbaziira used the 45 litres of milk they were getting daily to start making yoghurt. 

“I had about Shs500,000 in my savings with which I bought saucepans, a milk can and firewood. From the milk, I got 43 litres as two got lost in vaporization. It was so tiring using firewood and doing everything manually yet I did not have money to buy the necessary equipment,” Mbaziira recollects her struggles in the beginning.

Her first customers were relatives and friends and she started with 20 litres, which took her one week to sell.

“The beauty of value addition is that it gives a product a long shelf life. In my case, yoghurt takes a month to expire, so I would be able to sell to my clients something they would consume before it went bad. For that, I was thankful,” she says with a smile.

 Nonetheless, the beginning was tough because she had a young family with children in Kampala schools in Primary Two to Primary Five, yet she had to make the farm work.

“It was hard to balance both business and family singlehandedly. More to that, while I needed to get a good product, the milk in Kampala has a lot of additives, which would compromise the quality and yet I wanted and still believe in giving clients the best. So I had to set camp at the farm after the school week, taking a bus to the farm on Friday to process the milk and heading to Kampala, where my market was, on Sunday evening,” Mbaziira says.

On Monday, Mbaziira would drop off the children before going to vend the yoghurt.  This went on until the youngest of her children was in Primary Seven and she took them to a boarding school.

“With this, I could ably spend up to a week at the farm doing processing, inspecting the farm and training workers,” she says.

But soon, she hit a snag she discovered that some clients were not ready to pay cash.

“This was tough as I needed to buy the ingredients, fuel the car and buy supplies for the family,” Mbaziira says. At the farm, Mbaziira who currently employs 10 permanent staff and eight non-permanent ones suffered the pain of losing trained staff due to inconsistent payment. “Seeing that I only came on the weekends, I needed trained people to keep the farm running. However, most of these were only there to copy what I was doing and later move on with the clients. It slowed the growing process but I kept on,” she says.

 To manage the farm better and improve the quality of her produce, Mbaziira sought training from Uganda Industrial Research Institute (UIRI) and Africa Institute for Strategic Service and Development (AFRISA) at Makerere University in food handling and value addition, specifically for dairy products. The training cost her Shs140,000 for two weeks.

Today, AWA foods, located in Masha, Isingiro District, 12 miles from Mbarara, was registered in 2012 as a dairy farm processing milk into yoghurt, cheese, and ghee.

 “We use 1,000 litres of milk a day and when we are short of milk, we outsource from Nyamitsindo Dairy Farmers’ Coop. of which we are members.”

AWA proudces yogurt in various flavours such as plain, strawberry and vanilla. It also comes in various quantities of 5ltr, 2ltr, 1ltr, 500mls and 400mls going for between Shs1,000 and Shs5,000 while ghee and cheese are sold in 500gms and1kg going for Shs13,000 and Shs25,000 and Shs10,000 and Shs18,000 respectively. Mbaziira’s clientele has also grown mostly by word of mouth.

AWA Foods was one of the winners of the 2019 Rising Woman competition, and that earned Mbaziira a ticket to Nairobi, Kenya for training. “Apart from being an immense joy that I won, through the trainings I learned about the value of networks in market acquisition and sharing ideas,” she shares. She also had the opportunity to compare and share notes with other women.

Challenges

According to Mbaziira, staff retention is the biggest challenge she has faced. “The people we work with do not share our vision and passion. Therefore, while we pour a lot of resources to train them in how to handle the farm, production and the like, they leave at the slightest opportunity. That is a major setback because you need to train a replacement and in that time, a lot could go wrong, such as losing a cow during delivery,” she laments.

 Another challenge is appreciation of local produce. “Our society is yet to embrace locally made things. Many think that if it is from here, the product is not any good, yet we put a lot of work and passion to ensure we produce the best,” Mbaziira notes.

Victories

Nonetheless, Mbaziira says with resilience and passion, the challenges become opportunities. For instance due to her dedication, AWA Foods has been recognised and has won several awards such as Rising Woman programme where they emerged fifth.

“Prior to that, we won an award from DDA and SNV for adding value to dairy products in 2015. In 2018, we were the overall winners in the Harvest Money competition by Vision Group, while in 2019, we got special recognition by UWEAL for community participation, which earned us the LUBOGO community Award,” Mbaziira shares.

 Future

Mbaziira says rather than chase money, she will chase her passion.