Kampala — SHE is yet to graduate with a degree in education, but Carol Asiimwe has already carved a niche in the honey business, Elizabeth Agiro writes

Once, in her Geography class at Makerere University's School of Education, Carol Asiimwe's lecturer announced that she supplied him with a litre of honey every two weeks.

He asked her classmates to emulate her by not just looking for jobs, but starting their own businesses. Everyone burst into loud, prolonged laughter.

"I felt so bad," she says of the incident.

Today she bumps into several of them jobless in Wandegeya. Although she asked some of them to help her sell honey, none has called her back.

She is yet to graduate with a degree in education, but Asiimwe has carved out a niche in the honey business. It all started in Ibanda when she was barely 14 years old.

Asiimwe and her younger brother were out scouting for fruits when she spotted a mound of bees on the stem of a nearby tree. She was mesmerised by the science behind it. How is it that such dangerous insects produce something so sweet?

Soon after, she and her brother set to work on making a beehive. After several attempts and bungled jobs, a village drunkard came to their rescue.

He helped them set up the beehive and the duo set off, leaving the hive to do all the work. A few months later, they returned to find the honey had matured.

Amidst stings from bees, they successfully got the honey, eventually. Initially, they sold it only to the people in the village, but later expanded their clientele to school.

Her brother, at the time the more astute one, made sh2,000 per term from selling honey in school. Asiimwe, then at Bweranyangi Girls, didn't have the guts.

Today, however, all traces of the shy teenager are gone and in place, a confident woman who can walk into any office with 10 jerrycans of honey and won't leave empty-handed.

This 24-year-old talks about honey with contagious enthusiasm. She tells about how she and her brother convinced their mother, by crying, to not clear trees in the neighbourhood, which would have provided land for growing millet and other crops.

Instead, they suggested building more beehives and placing them at strategic points all over the one and a half acres of family land.

"If you copy an idea, then it won't work out. You have to be creative," she says, arguing that it beats waiting for a salary.

While they started with only three beehives, Asiimwe intends to have at least 700 by the end of next year.

"As long as you are doing your own business, you will have money in your pocket, you can't get tired," she says.

making beehives

Asiimwe hires men in her village, if she can't spare the time to do it herself. The process starts with waist-high sticks planted into the ground to form a circle. Grass is then intertwined in the sticks to seal any holes.

The sticks are then uprooted and one end closed off to form a barrel-like structure. Hereafter, cow dung is smeared on the outside to make it escape-proof. It is then left in the wild to attract bees.

Asiimwe further explains that it takes up to three months for honey to mature. The beauty with them is that you don't have to spend money on food.

"You don't need to feed them. You just pass by and smell money when the honey is mature," she says, adding that keeping bees is the most appropriate way of dealing with poverty for those without much land. It is also one of the best ways to preserve nature; you don't have to burn trees.

"We need to exploit nature and benefit from it economically," Asiimwe says.

In addition to her business, Asiimwe earns a salary as a researcher on social policy, analysis and design at Reev Consult International, where her boss, Prof. Augustus Nuwagaba, inspires her.

He was the one who encouraged her to carry on her business without shame.

Next year, she plans to start a consultancy on apiary (keeping bees for honey).

Through this, she says she will teach people how to reduce household poverty and train them how to start a business with minimum capital. Asiimwe got this idea during her research on poverty alleviation in Kamuli.

She came across a family of 17 children, who lived on two acres of land and yet had no food to eat.