Nyangorora Banana Processors was started in 2006 as a youth group working as a farmers’ field school involved in educating farmers on modern farming methods and research on different varieties of banana. Seven years later in 2013, the group registered as a limited company.
“We decided to venture into banana value chain and undertake value addition on banana because there are a lot of bananas in Kisii and farmers are exploited by middlemen who offer miserable prices,” says Aska Kerubo, the managing director of Nyangorora Banana Processors.”
The processing plant is housed under Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute (KIRDI) who has provided them with space to incubate the business since 2008. Within this time, the processor has benefitted a great deal from KIRDI who have equipped them with knowledge and skills in different products into banana processing. Nyangorora Processors benefited from a SWITCH Africa Green project, capacity enhancement for green business development and Eco-entrepreneurship. The project was granted to Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) in partnership with Kenya Agribusiness and Agro Industry Alliance. SWITCH Africa Green programme is funded by the European Union.
“The SWITCH Africa Green programme has been a turning point for us. There are things that we never considered seriously especially the impact they have on the performance and profitability of the enterprise,” adds Aska. “We had never thought of product diversification and how to make better use of banana that have over-ripen until SWITCH Africa Green programme took us to a networking tour to Uganda.”
In Uganda, they learned that they did not have to throw away the over ripe bananas that cannot be milled but instead can be used to make banana wine and banana jam. From the Uganda exchange visits the group has commenced production of banana wine and jam and hence diversifying the number of products from only two to four through embracing eco-innovation.
“I decided to do more research on what we can get from bananas. I learnt that by using a solar dryer to dry the bananas, the cost of drying was like half of what we were doing initially.”
One thing that instantly impacted on their operation directly was how pricing and packaging of their products was done.
“We did our costing locally by comparing what was on the shelves in the supermarkets,” says Aska. “Initially, we put our prices without doing proper costing and we realized we were making a loss of Ksh. 68 (USD 0.7) per kilo. We were able to overcome this through our networking with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) who seconded a volunteer expert for a period of two years to help us with product pricing and branding.”
