(ERGO) – Fadumo Nur Mohamed, a widowed mother of seven, has a fulltime job in Mogadishu collecting cow dung for Somalia’s only natural gas and fertilizer factory. Working six days a week, she is among 135 internally displaced people hired at JikoBioGas plant.
“I report to work at 6:00 am in the morning,” said Fadumo, who lives in Rajo IDP camp in the city’s Hodan district.“ I collect cow dung from different areas, including villages in Yaqshiid, Karaan and Darulsalaam. The company sends us to the places where many cows are herded.”
The dung they collect is transported for weighing at the factory. For 20 kg of dung, Fadumo is paid five and half dollars. She usually makes up to seven dollars a day, which pays the family’s daily bills and the $12 monthly school fees for her eldest son in grade 10.
“People ask us if this was the only job we could find. Sometimes we are turned away at the gate by the owners of the cows,” she said.
However, she weathers the insults as the job is far better than her earlier casual work washing clothes for households, earning nothing more than100,000 Somali shillings. Fadumo, whose husband died in 2016, fled to Mogadishu with her children from a rural area in Hudur in 2017 after losing her 100 goats to drought.
Another employee, Mohamed Gelle Hassan, 25, supports his mother and four siblings on the four to five dollars a dayhe makes at the JikoBioGas factory. He has been able to take over from his mother’s small earnings selling groundnuts.
“I support my family with the money I earn as I am the first born in the family,” said Mohamed, whose family became IDPs after their farm in Jowhar was washed away by river floods in 2019.
Most of the employees at JikoBioGas live in IDP camps in Mogadishu and Jowhar, according to the vice chairman, Abdirizak Bare Ali. They have plants in both cities. They also supply free cooking fuel to some IDP families, so that women do not need to walk long distance collection firewood.
JikoBioGas, established in 2017, aims to end the use of firewood and charcoal and promote alternative clean and cheap fuel to mitigate climate change in Somalia.
“Some of the benefits of this project include the production of natural cooking gas and organic agricultural fertilisers, which are better than imported ones. We have tested the fertilisers on farms in Galhareri as well as in house gardens in Mogadishu and farms in Middle Shabelle region. Everyone has praised its effects and are ordering a lot,” he told Radio Ergo.
