DRDIP triggers communities through bee keeping in Yumbe

A group of 12(seven women, five men) active folks are championing a transformative vision  within a close-knit rural community in Yumbe district, thanks to the Office of the Prime Minister’s Development Response to Displacement Impacts Project (DRDIP) for providing a springboard.

Garube Apiary sub project beehives, Yumbe

With a generous start-up capital of Shs18,500,000; invaluable financial literacy training coupled with constant support supervision, these community members are on the brink of a life-changing journey, fuelled by their identified enterprise: bee keeping.

Located in Kuru Sub County, Garube Apiary sub-project started in March 2023 with less than 10 beehives, but now boasts of 85 hives when DRDIP advanced the support.

“Each beehive produces 30 litres of honey per season or 60 litres in a year”, Ratib Abele, the group leader explains. This means the group’s prospect is to harvest up to 2,520 litres of honey every season or 5,040 litres annually since honey is harvested twice in a year.

Yumbe district Natural Resource focal point for the project, Kemis Ambaga says, “support from DRDIP was timely and it has surely landed on the right target group”.

A litre of distilled honey costs Shs10,000 when sold locally within the West Nile towns of Yumbe, Koboko or Arua.  This means, Garube Apiary project can potentially bring cash worth Shs25,200,000 per season or earn Shs50,400,000 annually. Both figures projected to arrive within the very first year are already enough to bring back the initial capital invested.  

Abele said his group members chose bee keeping because it’s easy to manage and yet brings returns quickly enough to treat poverty. “We considered bee keeping as the nearest medicine to treat poverty and so far we are on the right track”.  “We intend to expand our project to at least 500 beehives and do honey processing here, then target selling beyond our Ugandan market”, Abele explained.

With a promising first harvest that came in December 2023, one beneficiary, Rasul Aluma said, “our profits for this first blessing is going direct for strengthening value addition, we shall later target empowering our individual investments at household. “Now is for creating bloc wealth, then we shall spread the wealth when profits start overflowing” he brags.

Honey is more profitable than the much talked about petroleum. Whereas a litre of petrol is sold between Shs5,500 to Shs6,000, a liter of distilled honey gives the seller not less than Shs10,000 in the Ugandan market. Uganda ranks fourth in honey production in Africa after; Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia respectively. Pharmaceuticals around the world rely heavily on honey as a key raw material for making medicines, thus the honey business is attractive not just locally but for the international market.

Bee keeping is also beneficial to local farmers as bees help in pollination of plants such as sunflowers. It is cheaper to start up the bee keeping project but local farmers’ major challenges are: access to basic information, logistics required to improve quality and achieve bumper production and to ensure value addition.