Johannesburg — Farouk Jiwa, 28 years old and a fourth generation Kenyan-Asian, went to Canada to study environmental biology. He returned home with a bachelor's degree and looked for a niche in the environmental market, which he found: making honey.
Sustainable bee keeping has become Jiwa's livelihood. Armed with self-confidence and determination, as well as his new skills and the will to succeed, Jiwa teamed up with two like-minded Kenyans. They added their confidence and commitment as well as US$150,000 apiece - and Honey Care Africa was born. The company's motto is "Honey from Africa: Honey for the World".
Honey Care Africa is one of the projects of the Kenya branch of the Global Environmental Facility's (GEF) Small Grants Programme (SPG). This is implemented by the United Nations' Development Programme (UNDP).
Farouk Jiwa is in South Africa to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). He has a stall set up at UNDP's Ubuntu Community Kraal at the Ubuntu Village, a few miles from the WSSD conference venue at Sandton.
AllAfrica's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton went along to meet Jiwa to find out more about his bee-keeping enterprise, its novel approach and the reaction of Kenya to new-look, new-tasting honey.
I am a Kenyan and I am the general manager of Honey Care Africa. It is a small company in Kenya that is promoting community-based bee keeping.
Precisely what does that mean?
What we try and do is make it accessible for small-scale farmers who live in communities and who now access beehives on a lone basis. We get people in collectives; individual ownership of hives exists, yes, because we are all capitalists at heart. But at the same time we try to make sure that we develop some sort of cooperative or some sort of association, where farmers can work together. All hives are provided either on a loan or cost-sharing basis.
We are also working to promote bee keeping with more than 400 independent self-help groups, development groups and community-based organisations all over the country. In addition, we have numerous bee keeping projects with various individuals, where the size of the apiaries range from 5 hives up to 800 hives.
When did you start and what set you along this course? Did you learn about this sustainable form of bee keeping in another country?
When I returned back home to Kenya after my university education in environmental biology at Queen's University in Canada, I decided to go back and see if there was any way that I could get involved in any sector of agriculture in any particular way. Bee keeping made the most sense, because it worked really well for the environment, had no negative impact and, at the same time, it worked quite nicely in developing incomes and generating money for communities as well.
Of course, there was bee keeping in Kenya before you got back home but how does the manner in which you are making honey differ from what was happening before?
I think first and foremost, probably the most important thing is that there has been a change in technology. We use the Langstroth beehive, which is a system of bee keeping that has been used in North America and Europe since the end of the First World War. It has never been used in Kenya and in East Africa in an organized way before.
How does the Langstroth method differ from conventional bee keeping?
It does two things. First and foremost you separate where the queen and the brood live from where the honey is produced. The second thing that you're doing is that you have recyclable honeycombs. So you are not cutting down the combs at the end of every season and you are not destroying the queen of the bees. So you have a continuous supply of honey throughout the year.
So tell us what normally happens? Are the queen bees and honeycombs destroyed?
Traditionally most communities in Kenya use log hives or basket hives, where you go in and smoke out the bees. You use a knife to cut out all the combs and put everything into a bucket. What you've basically done is you've damaged the beeswax, which is the most expensive thing, from an energy standpoint, for the bees to produce. At the same time you have destroyed the success of generations of bees that are being built in there as well.
Expensive in terms of time and effort for the bees?
Expensive in terms of time, I think, for the bees, and it just distracts them from producing honey because, until the combs have been built, you can't put any honey into the hives at all.
You say that in North America the Langstroth method has been going for more than fifty years. How come it hasn't traveled round the world and reached Kenya?
I think the first thing is that Kenya took the wrong turn in terms of bee keeping in the 1960s with the introduction of the Kenya Top Bar hive. It was at a time when people thought that appropriate technology was the best thing to do, never realizing that, at some stage, the best technology in the world was what people wanted.
The Top Bar hive unfortunately derailed the way bee keeping in Kenya was being developed. And nobody thought the structures were in place for the Langstroth hive to work.
Explain what the Kenyan method was, because I suppose in the 1960s people thought it was the best way.
It was considered to be appropriate for the level of development of the communities where you did not have to do a lot of training, where you did not have to go out and help the farmers extract the honey and they could go out and do it on their own. Unfortunately they produced very poor quality honey and it wasn't even marketable.
What do you mean by poor quality?
In terms of the moisture content of the honey, in terms of the smoke and in terms of the general appearance and taste of the honey. It was very smoky, very cloudy and the international market refused to accept that honey.
So who was eating the Kenyan honey?
It was primarily being used by local farmers and local communities.
And now?
Now we have 12,000 Langstroth hives across Kenya. We are producing large volumes of honey, approximately 65 metric tonnes this year. And we are able to supply almost all of that honey exclusively into the local market in Kenya. It is a high quality honey, an organic honey with unique natural flavours. We are supplying major retail outlets, hotels and industries in Kenya. It is available right across the country and we also have some surplus to start exporting now.
Have you begun exporting yet and if so, where to?
We have basically started exporting into Uganda and Tanzania. We started about a month and a half ago, but primarily the focus has been producing high quality honey for Kenyans first and foremost.
The funny thing about agricultural production in Africa is that Kenya, for example, produces the best coffee in the world and yet Kenyans drink the worst coffee. For a change we thought why don't we produce a high quality product which Kenyans know and Kenyans like: supply the local market first and then worry about the European market later.
How soon are you going to begin worrying about the overseas market rather than the east African regional market?
I think we have a lot of work to do in terms of first of all saturating the local market at every single level. The next thing we are trying to do is move away from glass jars into small little sachets, 15g sachets, like you get your tomato sauce when you go and buy chips in a sachet. We intend to have those available for 2 Kenyan shillings so that communities can now afford honey, before we think of the export market.
So now that you have consolidated your product in the local market and made sure that Kenyans are eating what you call good honey, how soon do you think you will begin marketing the idea of Kenyan honey outside your country in other parts of the continent? You have mentioned Tanzania and Uganda, but what about other African countries? Do you see such collaborations being a possibility?
I think the important thing for us to do is, first of all, to perfect the model that we have tried to develop in Kenya, make sure that we reach some saturation point and check that we are not overextending ourselves. I think Uganda is the next most logical step for us. We are now slowly building alliances with people in Lesotho and Swaziland.
This has emerged from the WSSD for us. And the idea now is to look at things strategically and decide, No. 1, where the money is going to come from and No. 2, who is actually going to go out and manage these projects.
How does the price of your honey compare with a pot of the old-style honey and what's the competition? Are people buying it, and are they satisfied?
Absolutely. I think people are buying primarily because of quality. But the other amazing thing that we have found is that social marketing does have a value in Kenya. People would like to know that their honey is being produced by communities and that it is supporting communities back at home. So, on those two bases, the community aspect of the work that we do, and the quality, people are absolutely opting for our honey, every time.
So how much is a pot of your honey? How much does Honey Care Africa honey cost?
How much do we sell it at? We sell it at approximately US$2.20 a jar.
How does that compare with your competitors?
We are comparable with international honey. It is probably about one and a half times the price of the local crude honey.
And that doesn't put people off, the fact that it's more expensive?
I think Kenyans are becoming far more savvy than they were probably 20 or 30 years ago. They want a high quality product. They have Australian honey sitting on the same supermarket shelves and honey from the United States. You have to convince them and give them a good reason why they should opt for Kenyan honey versus honey from outside.
What do Kenyans primarily use honey for?
That's an interesting question. There are 42 different tribes in Kenya. First and foremost, if you were a young man and you wanted to get married in many communities, without 5kg of honey to take to your bride-to-be, you would not get married.
Apart from the traditional and cultural value that honey has in Kenya, it is used for sweetening tea and pastries, but also on bread or just eating on its own. The medicinal value of honey, of course, cannot be underscored for African communities. It has been there all the way through and it continues to be revived as a result of the organic movement and other movements in North America that seem to be filtering through and reminding people of the value honey had in their communities before.
How much support do you get from the Ministry of Agriculture?
It was initially quite challenging with the Ministry of Agriculture, but we have now broken down a lot of barriers. We are working very closely with them in Kitui and Taita-Taveta Districts and in Kwale District and a whole number of other areas. The district bee keeping officers and my project officers share motorbikes and drive around to villages together, so things have improved a lot.
What were those initial barriers?
I think because they were very closely involved with the introduction of the Kenya Top Bar hive that had established a hegemony in every single village about who had the information. But that has now changed, because we have gotten them trained, we have given the proof that you can see bigger, better harvests and your farmers are getting paid more.
So that must mean that you have managed, or are managing, to change the mindset of the officials, but how did you change the way in which communities think? Why did they accept your method, what was in it for them?
The biggest thing was going out and doing a lot of demonstrations and ensuring as much as possible that we were able to provide training to the farmers; and then putting your money where your mouth was, offering a guaranteed market to the farmers, to buy back whatever honey they were going to produce.
And we have a simple process: it's called money for honey, cash payments on the spot at the farm gate for the farmers.
After the first harvest or the second harvest, people finally began to believe that here is a private company with a different way of doing business. Once they see the money in their pockets, things change quite dramatically!
And has honey made you money? Are you a rich man now?
We are hoping to turn a profit at the end of this year. It's been about two and a half years of very hard work, reinvesting our salaries every month, but I think at the end of this year we should be able to make a breakthrough.
Who are 'we'?
We, at Honey Care, are myself and two other likeminded investors who I coaxed into making investments of US$150,000 each and promised to look after their money. They are two other Kenyans, apart from myself.
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So it's a wholly Kenyan-financed, Kenyan-operated project?
100 percent Kenyan, all the way through.
Who thought of the name of your company, Honey Care Africa?
I think it was a combined effort. We wanted to put across three simple things. We were dealing with a particular commodity, which was honey. We were based in Africa geographically and we were trying to demonstrate the fact that this is a slightly different company, that we want to do this in a fair trade manner and we want to be an ethical organization. And we really do care about the communities we want to work with. We are building long-term partnerships. So, that's how Honey Care Africa emerged as a name.
I suppose now Kenyans have a reason to be proud of their honey?
I think they are coming to a stage when they can appreciate the fact that they are producing world class honey in different flavours, mind you, depending on the flowers bees go to, you get different types of honey.
For example?
We have coffee honey, which we are just beginning to slowly start marketing. We are blending honey today. But eventually we'll have acacia honey, coffee honey, passion flower honey, wild comb and African Blossom. We might even be getting coconut honey very soon. All these are different flavours where you can actually taste the exotic fruits and flowers from which this honey is derived.
Does coffee honey have a coffee-ish flavour?
It does. We don't know what the caffeine content is, but it definitely tastes like coffee.
And what about your assessment of the World Summit of Sustainable Development here in Johannesburg. Has it been useful for you and positive?
It has been a wonderful experience and an eye-opener in many ways, because it has given us a chance to learn from the other people who are being funded by the Small Grants Programme of the UNDP, to learn more about other activities and other communities like those that are being funded by the GEF in Kenya and see what experiences they have had as well.
A final question, probably the most important, any chance of tasting some of your honey?
I would like you to try some of our Highland Blend honey. This comes from passion fruit and some of the gravilia and the croton that grows in the highland areas of Kenya. I'm going to give you some of the taste for the honey.
It's a glorious colour, it's a sort of gold. It's a dark gold honey. Mmm. Ooh, it's sweet, sweetish. But you can actually taste the flavour of the flowers in there as well.
Delicious, it's very fruity isn't it?
It is fruity honey and it's got a good aftertaste as well. It's almost like wine, you can almost tell the different types of honey in Kenya now. Like I said, we have 37 different flavours of honey now.
Lovely. Thank you very much.
I think we have one more satisfied customer now!
Certainly! Thank you.
