Four Limpopo women have literally plucked the opportunity to make money from trees. The group from Nkowa Nkowa near Tzaneen has set up a small factory and can barely keep pace with the demand for their jams and fresh fruit juices.
They already supply local hotels in the tourist-dense Tzaneen as well as school feeding schemes around the area with their delicious juices and paw-paw jam.
“We started this project because as women we wanted to find a way to reduce unemployment and poverty in our area,” says Chivirikane Producers Co-operative coordinator Petunia Moatlhudi.
“Many women in our village suffer because their husbands went to Johannesburg to look for jobs and never returned. Others are widows and some have to rely on their husband’s salary of as little as R250 a month to support their families,” she says.
“Our village has an abundance of fruit trees and we thought: why not make juice and jam?”
Their main obstacle was to raise the money to set up the project. As luck would have it they heard about a South African Breweries (SAB) initiative to sponsor rural business and sent in an application.
“In 1998 SAB donated factory equipment including a 3m x 3m cold storage room to keep the juices cool in our hot and humid climate,” says Moatlhudi.”They also donated a bakkie so we could distribute our product effectively.”
The 43 founding members of the project soon dropped to four because the hot and sticky work of making jam and juice didn’t bring in much money initially.
“Most of the women left because we weren’t earning a salary from the project initially and they still had to pay for transport to get to work,” Moatlhudi says.
The project now turns over between R15 000 to R20 000 a month but the project members only draw a R300 salary each and plough most of the profits back into the business. “We don’t just want to be a project, we want to operate like a real business,” Moatlhudi says.
“We aren’t just doing this for ourselves but so that our children and community members will have jobs when they finish school because there aren’t enough jobs now,” says Moatlhudi.
SAB spokesperson Jabu Mathe says the company chose to sponsor the jam and juice project because it was unique. “Their business plan was unique and there are plenty of fruit trees in Tzaneen, which made it a viable project to fund,” he says.
Chivirikane has already won two awards from SAB. In 1998 it won first prize in the national Women in Rural Areas competition and in 1999 it won second prize.
“Unemployed women should be independent and involve themselves in projects. They should ask for help when they run into difficulties but most of all they should be patient and not expect to earn large amounts of money right away,” says Moatlhudi. — African Eye News Service