By Gabrielle Rosenau, October 2019
Meet Mrs Naggayi Florence, mother of 6 children, taking care of all expenses by herself. She gets her income mainly from her one acre coffee garden. Before Ibero Uganda offered her the high quality fertilizer advance scheme, she used to struggle and earn less than UGX 100,000 (USD 27) in a season. This would not sustain her from one season to the next, she would use all the money on family day-to-day expenditures. The greatest challenge was how to pay school fees for her children since paying school fees and coffee harvest do not coincide. The village traders used to give her loans at a low fixed price per kilogram of coffee throughout the season.
After less than a year of joining NKG BLOOM, she has not only been able to get a fair price for her coffee but also to pay for the school fees from the NKG BLOOM Mobile Money credit line. This credit line is available any time she needs it, through sending a simple USSD-code from her personal phone: “It has never disappointed me”, she says. She is already expecting to at least double her harvest for the next harvest and hence her income increasing substantially as well. And this is just the beginning after less than a year applying fertilizer and practicing good agricultural practices.
