Cooking Oil producer, Wamunyima Simunji

Results after one year guidance by Jacana

Now Wamunyima Simunji added a shop to her business, made a brand for her cooking oil and does more in vegetable farming. Jacana Business Empowerment guided her for one year. Wamanyima is a hard worker, created seasonal income for some of her community members and is a great example in her neighborhood. Now sales for soja, sunflower oil and sunflower cake went up. She sells all the oil processes.

The below video shows how the Mrs. Simunji started their collaboration with Jacana (Jan 2016).

Expert Le Tran

Mrs. Wamunyima Simunji and Jacana are very happy with the excellent and fast work of “E-volunteer” Miss Le Tran. She is a junior at Arizona State University, USA. Currently, she is seeking for a product design internship. Have a look at other work of her at: http://www.letran.design.

Guiding & Monitoring data

January 2016

Wamunjima and her daughter came to Jacana office and learned how to enter the financial data of 2015 into the bookkeeping system.

February 2016

In the beginning of February Wamunjima had a skype meeting with Le Tran, designer from USA. Le volunteers to help Wamunjima with the design of her cooking oil label. Le asked all kind of questions to get a picture of what Wamunjima likes.

Le sent some examples of the cooking oil labels. Wamunjima has to make a choice between six beautiful sunflower and six beautiful soya been cooking oil labels. Some examples of the draft designs from Le.

1 sunflower

soya bean

sunflower cooking oil soya bean label

March 2016

Wamunjima and her husband came to the office to discuss on the designs. They chose a design for the sunflower and soya bean coocking oil.
Le Tran and Wamunjima emailed and skyped a few time this month. Early April the designs will be finished.
Dinie explained Wamunjima how to fill the incomes and outgoings in her bookkeeping book. She and her daughters entered it in the database. Begin of April Wamunjima and her daughter will come to the office to discuss the challenges and learn how to interpret the numbers.

April 2016

During the final stages of the design process, the entire Simunji family is involved. Discussing it with Le Tran as the sun goes down in Zambia and rizes on the other side of the line in Amerika.
Wamunjima’s daughter faithfully enters all financial data in the computer and makes her first Cash flow, Profit & Loss and Balance sheet reports.

May and June 2016

Wamunjima and her daughter learned how to enter the bank statements, assets and loan in the bookkeeping system.
The labels were printed and can be used for selling.

July 2016

Wamunjima sees new faces ordering cooking oil, which means that the cooking oil business is growing.
She is selling the maize she harvested. From the profit she can buy seeds for the cooking oil.

August 2016

This month Mrs. Simunji faced some challenges. Her cooking oil machine broke down, but lucky it could be repaired. And if that was not enough for one month also her computer crashed and unfortunately she did not make back-ups from her book keeping system. Jacana has a back up until June 2016. Her daughter will enter the data again from June up to August 2016.

September / October 2016

Mrs. Simunji sold most of her maize and she made sunflower cooking oil from all the sunflower seeds she had. She sold all the oil, but she found it difficult to find a market for the sunflower cake (by-product of the sunflower oil production, used to feed livestock etc.). With the support of Jacana, she now found the market for it. Within a week everything was sold. Next time Mrs. Simunji knows how to access markets for all kind of agricultural products herself.

Next to the cooking oil production she is growing vegetables. She can do that throughout the year because she has access to water.

Wamunyima started her cooking oil business “Temuho Agro Processing” in 2013. She operates from a farm on the Great North Road 60 km from Lusaka. A building was constructed where she houses a hammer mill, store room, shop, small truck, tractors and the cooking oil business. Besides this she grows vegetables, maize, soya beans and potatoes. She has three employees at the moment and some piece workers during busy times. Wamunyima has the capacity to become a great business woman and she has the required motivation and perseverance. During the Jacana basic training she showed these characteristics as well. Therefore we as Jacana belief that Wamunyima has great potential to be not only a great businesswoman, but also give other people the opportunity to develop them self and be a role model for other Zambians. Wamunyima agreed to support other entrepreneurs as volunteer expert in future Jacana programmes.

At this moment (January 2016) she wants to expand her business by branding her cooking oil and sell them first to shops in the neighborhood and later to supermarkets in towns. Wamunyima realizes that expanding the cooking oil business means that she has to implement a financial systems, develop some management skills and she needs to certify the cooking oil for selling. Since she never received any training in these fields, she asked help from Jacana.

Wamunyima has enormous hidden capacities which Jacana wants to reveal. She successfully completed the training by Jacana in business, financial and marketing planning. We all know how inspiring a conference or a short training can be, but the next morning we are absorbed again by our day-to-day activities.

Therefore Jacana wants to guide Wamunyima for some time to help her implement the required systems. To be able to support Wamunyima we need your financial help. Every small amount is more than welcome. Simply fill in (above) any amount you can afford.

Simply fill in (above) any amount you can afford. Thank you on behalf of Wamunyima Simunji

Simply fill in the amount above.

Wamunyima is married and mother of two daughters and two sons. She started, encouraged by her husband, two years ago with her cooking oil business “Temuhö Agro Processing”. At this moment she has three employees and during busy times she hires some piece workers. She wants to expand her cooking oil business by selling the bottles to small shops first and to supermarkets in the future. Wamunyima is happy that Jacana selected her for the guidance.