(ERGO) – Shukri Ali Mohamud, 54, a business woman in Garowe and a mother of 12 children, is enjoying the decent family income she is now making from a new method of marketing her fresh farm produce.
She owns a farm in La’dheer village in Nugal region of Puntland and markets her perishable stock of fruit and vegetables by going round in a car, selling everything before it goes bad.
She is making an average of $30 a day in profit, part of which she invests in her farm.
The car she uses is mounted with speakers so they can drive through busy areas marketing and selling to customers she wouldn’t otherwise have found.
“We tell people what we have, like peppers or chillis, and we go out and sell our goods. It’s profitable and I come back home with a good income. I’m not worried about the produce going bad now. We make 40% profit compared to about 10% previously,” she said.
With improved income, Shukri has repaid the $420 loan she took to buy seeds and fuel for water pumps for her farm this year. She is also happy to see her family enjoy all three meals.
Four of her children were almost barred from sitting the annual exams at Gambool school as she hadn’t paid the last three months’ $66 fees, but she managed to settle the balance just in time from her income.
Whenever the children are not at school, they and her elderly husband help her on the farm.
“Today I’m able to hire a car and start selling my produce. I can deliver it to shops, supermarkets and hotels. It’s a new way of selling the farm produce,” she said.
Shukri used to depend on her relatives sending her $80 a month, but now she is making around $450 a month from her farm business.
This marketing idea was promoted by Kobciye training programme, hosted by Puntland’s Ministry of Agriculture and local organisation Salaam Development Center (SDC), where Shukri and other farmers were trained on how to market produce to improve their sales.
Anod Elmi Karshe, who owns a two-hectare farm in Uun district, has also adopted this method. This single mother of nine children also sets off in a rental car loaded with her produce to find new markets.
She sells tomatoes, onions, pepper, coriander, watermelons, lemons, bananas and guava. In March, April and May, she made $1,600 in profit from her sales.
She has been able to support her two eldest children to enroll in courses at a local university in April, after a long period of financial insecurity.
“Our business has improved because we have sold everything we harvested. I have recovered my costs and made profits. I don’t use tables to sell my produce now and I don’t need to take loans to invest in my farm. It has been a big motivation for us, even as we are in the dry season and the farm output is low,” she said.
Anod said she didn’t know much about marketing before. The first trip she and four other women made in a car netted them $220. She realised that delivering her produce that way could be lucrative.
“My nine children and I depend on the farm output. This business has been helpful and I feel motivated. I have an account where I deposit my money. It’s much better than how we ran our business before,” she said.
Anod is a former pastoralist, whose 40 goats died in the drought in Nugal region. She hopes to restock with livestock using her farm income.
The Kobciye project coordinator, Abdiaziz Abdikadir Jama, said farmers in Nugal were grappling with drought and little understanding of how to improve sales when they started the training in 2023. Around 100 small-scale farmers were trained in marketing and sales to improve their farm businesses.
“The farmers didn’t know how to improve their sales. We came up with this model of delivering goods to the markets, and they have succeeded in reaching more customers in different neighborhoods,” Abdiaziz said.
