Skip to content 
“I got into beekeeping at a tender age. We used to do it as a hobby. But after I grew up, I took it up as an enterprise, especially after having received skills training about the project and realizing that it fetches good money. It is now one of my side projects from which I get additional income. As a CBF, I also now encourage people to join the enterprise because is easy to join. It is not expensive especially if you start with local materials.”
The Life as Beekeeper
Who belongs to your family / who is living with you?
My name is Daniel. I am a group lead farmer and from the NGO side, I am also a CBF (Community-Based Facilitator). We are 5 people in the home including my children. I also support my parents, so overall we are seven people.
How has beekeeping changed your life?
I have benefited from selling honey. I know that it can give you good money. I have bought animals-goats from honey. When you have good harvest, you get good returns and that supports the family in many ways. So generally, I have benefited from this project. But now to realize that big change in life, we will need to scale it up seriously. But the challenge has always been lack of capital.
How do you provide a good environment for your bees?
Trees are very important to us. For instance, for this project, trees are necessary, for forage, shade and even attracting rainfall. Ideally, people should not be cutting trees indiscriminately. But here, the natural trees are mostly gone because people burn them into charcoal. So, there is need to promote tree planting. If we could get some support from organizations like Honey Pride Arua, we would be very appreciative. Now that most natural trees are going, may be people should be encouraged to plant trees like mangoes because if they know it is planted, there is no way someone will cut it down. But also if the trees are in your own garden, you can stop them from cutting.
What do trees mean to you and how can they be protected?
Trees are good. They told us trees protect the soils and make them fertile. That is why our place looks good. Trees also give us good fresh air and they provide us with shade, even the bees. That is why we put the hives under those shades. In this place, people burn a lot of charcoal. However, if the land is yours, you can stop them from cutting the trees in that piece of land.
.What is the most important thing in your life?
The most important thing in my life is education because it opens ways in business, even these days gardening requires knowledge. So, education is the most important thing in my life.
What are your biggest challenges and how do you plan to overcome them?
Our biggest challenge here is lack of capital to do projects on a big scale. Individually you can’t and if you try a group, it does not work the way you would like. We also have challenges of school fees, health issues in the home, especially children, garden work and money for buying inputs etc. Sometimes you rent fields where you want to carry out special projects…all these need capital and we don’t have that. Raising capital needs you to have different sources of income. But here we are limited, so addressing the challenge of raising capital remains itself the challenge
What do you like to do in your free time?
During my free time I like watching things like football matches of other good programme
Which place would you like to see once?
Right now the main task I do is small scale farming. So, if there was opportunity to go and see a place, I would love to reach Netherlands where it is said they do farming differently, so that I have exchange of ideas in farming.
