Jony

Girma

Our business project is about creating sustainable supply chain of organic honey through creating commercialized youth beekeepers in natural forest area. The project works with rural unemployed youth in natural forest area with no land and no income source. Ethiopia faces complex challenges of food insecurity, overpopulation, drought and large scale out-migration flows. Apart from these challenges, ecological degradation, drought, and poverty are historically among the major causes of migration in Ethiopia. Especially, this day there is big rural migration to urban, Middle east and to the EU. In the South west Ethiopia in natural forest area the rural youth use selling timber, charcoal and other forest product as income sources which is a big burden on the forest.  In order to keep productive rural unemployed youth in the agriculture sector and to conserve the natural forest, it is vital to create sustainable agribusiness job for the youth. Our strategy is working with rural unemployed youth in systematic organic honey production and linking to forest conservation. Forest conservation without incentive to the society living in and around the forest is impossible. We have a slogan for sustainability of the intervention “No tree, No bee, No honey, No money”. 

We call this project YAP (Young Apipreneur Project) means entrepreneurship in apiculture. YAP is a project which connecting these rural unemployed youth in natural forest area to production and marketing of organic honey. Our solution is connecting these rural unemployed youth in natural forest area to production of organic honey and sustainable market.  The honey sector is one of the few sectors that have the most potential to achieve transformation and growth across all categories of rural households. To achieve our mutual goal we attached our system to forest conservation since it is a backbone for our success.