Manyamula Oil Factory Malawi
The Challenge
Malawi is one of the countries in Sub Sahara Africa where the Agriculture sector is the backbone of the economy and supports about 85% of the population in terms of employment, it accounts for 35% of the Gross Domestic Product(GDP) and 90% of the Foreign Exchange Earnings (FEE). Farmers who live in villages located in Traditional Authority Mmbelwa at Manyamula Trading Centre in Mzimba District in the Northern Region of Malawi are small-scale farmers who produce sunflower seeds and peanuts. Agri-business of finished products is not very common in rural communities of Malawi as such most crop commodities are sold unprocessed where farmers fetch low cash returns for their labor. The price of their produce is largely controlled by the buyer who deals with each farmer individually.
The Innovation
The farmers have come together to form a cooperative called The Manyamula COMSIP Cooperative Society. This is a member-owned rural-based social and economic organization. So far the members have been pooling their produce of sunflower seeds and peanuts to get better pricing from the processors of cooking oil. The idea was to go a step further and produce the cooking oil from their seeds and market the oil. This required the building of an oil factory and the purchase and installation of an oil press, an oil filter, and packaging containers.
Long Term Impact
The factory building was funded by Spirit In Action and was built with labor and some materials supplied by the members of the cooperative. The Sumar Lakhani Foundation funded the purchase of the oil press and filter. The oil press and the oil bottling factory are completed and currently undergoing the initial phase of operation. The waste product called oil ‘cake’ is rich in protein and other nutritional ingredients. The oil cake will be used as animal feed by the members of the cooperative; many of them have chicken coops and other farm animals. The first batch of sunflower oil was well received in the local market and was sold out at a substantial profit margin.
The oil press factory will scale up with the new harvest of sunflower seeds. The oil factory can also produce cooking oil from peanuts and soybeans which are also locally farmed Overall, the members of the cooperative and local farmers are expected to see a substantial increase in their income while the factory will create several new jobs
