Honey, honey, honey. Where to begin with this one; so much has happen in the past few months. Honey business occupies a majority of my time, energy, and money. The beekeepers in the Mwazisi area were loosely associated for a long time. Most producing honey independently and eating it. My predecessor pushed an association to form but it seems to have collapsed by the time I arrived. It was said to have about 60 members. But the problem was that so much of his energies were devoted to the massive EPA construction that there was little time for the Association. So I took the liberty of wiping the board clean and starting over. I called a meeting of all interested citizens, held elections for an executive committee, penned a constitution (based on the Livingstonia constitution). We enacted a registration fee, rules for club membership, contracts, and formally founded the Mwazisi Beekeepers Association (MBA).
We currently boast a membership of over 100 people, each club with 10 members. The first training will be held on August 16th, spanning over 3 days covering everything from hive building to apiary management. In the meantime, I ordered plastic jars from Polypack in Blantyre and designed a label for the MBA brand. We will hopefully secure a loan with Total Land Care (TLC) that we can pay back over the next three years. This loan will cover hives, suits, and smokers for every member. I’m also in the process of securing permits and licences to hang hives in Vwaza Marsh and Nyika, as they have an abundance of flora. Once hives are up, I can begin business training for all the members, covering topics from SWOT analysis to bookkeeping. If all goes well and production commences within 12 months, we can begin the process of marketing, perhaps even with the aid of OVOP.
I’ve never written a formal constitution or drafted a loan contract, so it has been quite an educational experience. I used everything I learned from banking, especially everything Rudy taught me by explaining legal documents. Who would have thought confidentiality agreements and CIMs would help me draft contracts for beekeepers in Northern Malawi?
I’m pretty proud of these documents I made, more surprised really that I have the ability to write them. The surprise extends to managing 110 people, creating a brand, and marketing the honey. So, a big thank you to Rudy for the invaluable business lessons. I’m learning on my own that things are much more efficient and faster when less people are involved. The less people the more productivity at least so I’ve observed when it comes to managing beekeepers.
Structuring the organization has been the most difficult task, mainly because I don’t know. Changes will have to be made as we go, but after extended thought and discussions I determined the following structure: each club will manage itself independently, with its own Chairman, Secretary, and Treasurer. Each club will provide honey and manage its own finances. The Association will be the umbrella over each club, providing valuable services such as loans, equipment, processing facilities, bottling, labels, other support, and most importantly brand and marketing of bee products. There are a lot more intricacies to this relationship detailed in the constitution and contracts, like the sales fee, etc. This is quite serious for a group that is not even fully producing honey yet, but it’s necessary. The loan contract could be, if all goes well, for about Mk. 5 million, which is no joke in a rural village. One club falters and that loan falls on the Association. The contracts I drafted incorporate some of the principles used by the Grameen Bank, that extracted from reading Banker to the Poor. The concept of using groups for loans, in this case clubs, and using social/community pressures as incentives for repayment. Will the system work in Malawi? I don’t know, but I really hope it does, even though I’m concerned club size is double that used by Grameen and the loan amount is much larger than a microloan.
My goal, as I told the MBA members at the first meeting, is to walk into a store in the boma and find a bottle of Mwazisi Honey. 2 years. Bwenu. Whatever it takes, I want that goal achieved. Honey is in short supply in Malawi, far below demand. Thus, prices keep going up, currently about Mk. 500 to Mk. 700 per 500 g bottle. Which is absurd if you consider that 1 kg of peanut butter is about Mk. 500 and 500 g of jam is about Mk. 450. There are a couple of major producers in the North, mainly Mzuzu Coffee Growers , that bulk buy honey from local farmers at Mk. 200 to Mk. 300 per kg, then bottle and sell at more than double the price. This excludes profits realized on by-products, such as candles. Honey is a viable business in Malawi, especially in the light of tobacco regulations.
The only problem (and it’s a big worry that keeps me up at night) is that it all hangs on everything working simultaneously. I’m throwing all the pieces up in the air, with a hope and prayer, that they all fall in place and that the puzzle fits together. There is a Plan B, but even that maybe is a crapshoot. If the loan with TLC doesn’t go through, then grant money is my last hope (and I really don’t want to use grant money during my two years here, if I can help it, it just seems like a ridiculous concept). There are too many variables at play: the loan, active membership, paying back the loan, getting equipment, using it properly, producing honey, producing good honey, demand for honey, licences, taxes, approvals, permissions, the list goes on. Sometimes I wonder if it all fails I will just take over and make the honey myself if I have to. Another issue is that MBA is tied closely to the EPA construction project, as one whole room is dedicated for honey production. That needs to be completed before any significant advances are made with the honey group. The stress of the whole project is immense and ever growing. As I detailed in a previous post, stress seems to be positively correlated with an increase in membership. Everyone has hung their hopes on me handling it all. We have about 10 clubs in the Mwazisi catchment area, and now that Destroyer has gone, Kampenda has sent an 11th club to join. About 110 people. I need pieces to start hitting the ground so I can make changes accordingly. As of now, all the pieces are still in the air. And even once they fall, and if by some celestial miracle they fall in the right places, then the whole thing is wrapped in a bow of sustainability. Once I leave the group has continue on its own.
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