Mrs. Fanna Ceesay, a native of Kiang Kwinella village in Lower River Region (LRR), is a multitasking female entrepreneur who is engaged in poultry, animal husbandry, horticulture, Bakery and Agroforestry activities.
Dilating on her business undertakings during a WhatsApp interview, the versatile female entrepreneur, who is also a qualified senior teacher, recently told Mansa Banko Online newspaper that she started her agroforestry and vegetable gardening in 2016; and her poultry businesses in April 2018, with the hope of generating income from different streams to complement her monthly teaching salary.
The founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Rural Livelihood Enhancement Farm said with the proceeds from her vegetable garden she had been able to build her own poultry, and also bought 347 birds as a start-up with all the necessary items needed for a poultry farm. She also used proceeds from the poultry sales to construct an animal house as well as an incubator that has the capacity of hatching over 3,160 eggs, Madam Ceesay disclosed, adding she had also built a bakery from similar earnings.
Unfortunately, Ceesay suffered a severe setback when she lost over 3,600 eggs that she bought from Belgium for hatching because the entire consignment of eggs got spoiled due to, what she alleged to be, the negligence of the technicians and poor storage facilities.
She revealed: “I lost two hundred and twenty-three thousand eight hundred and sixty (D223,860) dalasi from this consignment of spoiled eggs. This is a great setback.”
According to Ceesay, the technician who supposed to regulate the temperatures and humidity of the incubator failed to do so, which resulted to that fatal loss of investment; and now the incubator is with her idling as she could no longer be able to place another order of eggs abroad.
However, the determined female gardener-cum-poulterer told this medium that, after a deep contemplation, she decided to join farming and entrepreneurship because her monthly salary wasn’t sustainable, and her people were also in need of such services and products as they used to suffer from getting products and services.
She noted that access to funding in the Gambia is hard, describing it as more than the ‘word difficult’; while saying she hasn’t benefited from any financial support despite undergoing several entrepreneurship trainings.
“I opted for agriculture because I like agriculture, and it is the fastest way to make money,” she intimated.
The Rural Livelihood Enhancement Farm owner now supplies whole-sellers and restaurant operators as her marketing strategies; albeit she deplores the slow business environment in her region. She admitted it’s difficult to get customers sometimes, and the Covid-19 pandemic had made matters worse as clients were nowhere to be seen.
Her own words, “During the pandemic, my staff too ran away.” Mrs. Ceesay used the interview to call on investors and donors to support her, so as to expand her businesses with a desire to stop Gambians from buying such products and services from outside.
