CONSILIA

Key Impact Metric Spotlight: Percentage of Ongoing and Profitable Businesses

Consilia joined our program as a coffee farmer aiming to not only improve the production of her coffee business but also to learn how to create additional innovative and lasting sources of income to support herself and her family.

After many months of training and mentorship, Consilia crafted a business plan for her idea of a beekeeping business. Based on past beekeeping experience and market research, she realized there was a need for honey in her local market and saw an opportunity to fill it. She then pitched her business plan during the final stages of the Kula Fellowship, outlining her projected profit, associated costs, and both the strengths and risks she would undertake in starting her business. After reviewing her plan and witnessing her potential, Kula invested in her idea and most importantly, in her.

Today, over two years have passed since graduating and Consilia is now running two thriving businesses, and in the midst of starting a third. Applying her investment, she started her honey business with 100 beehives; now she has 203. Since starting her business, she has increased her honey production per day by 200%. Through this growth and newfound financial security, she tripled her monthly savings, expanded her coffee farm by 50% through reforestation, and purchased a cow to provide organic fertilizer for her farm and milk for her children. Additionally, outside of providing nutrition-rich honey to an increasingly wide market, including transporting her product to Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city, Consilia’s honey business is now supporting the overall pollination and vibrancy of food-producing crops in her community. And, as a new venture, Consilia has also begun growing and selling hard-to-find grass varieties that can be used as valuable, organic mulching materials in her region’s coffee farms.

On top of all her accomplishments thus far, she is most proud of the fact that she is now able to afford the school fees to send all four of her children to school. She and her family are now well on their way to achieving their dream of building their very own home and continuing to invest in the future of her children through the growth of her businesses. Consilia’s story demonstrates that investing in agricultural entrepreneurs not only transforms the lives of individuals and their businesses, but also the land they depend on and the generations that follow them.