Business: Ten Powers of Women in Makhathini Flats in KwaZulu-Natal

Tell us about your Business

Our business is fairly young, only formed in 2020.  We are a cooperative that was formed by 10 women farmers.  We called it Ten Powers of Women because we wanted to ignite the power of women to successfully work together in farming.  As you know women are izimbokodo zesizwe… (nation’s rocks). We bring together years of individual subsistence farming experience.  This time we want to work together and become commercial farmers over time.

What are your objectives?

We want to bring together the amazing power of women, our womanly instincts and perseverance, our experience to break into the mainstream markets and fight poverty.  We want to have well run farms and make good business.

What is your role in the community?

We take our role as a gift that we must take very seriously.  As Ten Powers of Women we get the opportunity of making a difference daily in people’s lives.  Our operation has hired 12 young women and men to assist us to do our work on the soil.  We have also engaged local companies to gives us support with setting up irrigation.

But our biggest excitement has been our ability to support members of our community who are very disadvantaged.  We have provided vegetables to orphanages, 5 schools, and creches. 

What are your challenges?

Our project has been affected by the floods and the heatwave that were experienced in KwaZulu-Natal.  We also need water storage system that will enable us to irrigate even when there is loadshedding.  We also need cold storage facilities to store vegetables until the timing is good to sell for profit and also to ensure our produce stays fresh.  The additional infrastructure will allow our farm to operate efficiently.  Our challenge is to raise finance for infrastructure that will enable us to operate successfully.

Our second challenge is getting sustainable markets that can take our produce.  When Ten Powers of Women are producing at less than 3 hectares, the buyers from Durban will not release big trucks for small produce.  However planting a lot of hectares requires sizeable working capital. We are thankful to Nozala Trust who have made this project possible. 

What is Next for your business?

We are trying to recover from the devastation of the floods and replant.  We have planted 15 000 cabbage seedlings and we will be planting 15 000 green pepper seedlings.  We will be working hard to do the basics right in the field taking one step at a time, and also work with our partners like Peulwana for markets and sourcing funding.