From the beautiful swamps and fields of northern Malawi comes the aromatic Kirombero rice! A tasty produce that finds its way to many dinner tables across Malawi and the African continent at large! But producing this rice is a process that has a by-product that has for a long time been thrown away, heaped along the roads and rice mills to decay.
A small group of young people from Uliwa in Karonga, Northern Malawi, saw the numerous heaps of rice husk lying along the roads and around the many rice mills spread around the trading centre as a nuisance they had to get rid of. They thought about all the smoke that kept bellowing into the rather blue sky of their beautiful lakeshore location as people were trying to get rid of the heaps of husks from the rice mills. The health hazards from the smoke emanating from the burning heaps. The pollution.
Then an idea was sparked! What if they could turn these huge ever-present heaps into something worthwhile?
That is how the idea to produce charcoal briquettes, and livestock feed from the husks was born. With support from Church and Society Programme (CSP) through funding from Transform Aid International, a small group of dedicated young people from Uliwa were trained in briquette making and livestock feed production under a project dubbed “Trash to Treasure (TTT)”. The young people acquired entrepreneurship and business management skills, production skills and machinery to produce livestock feed. They are using the rice husk as one of the ingredients in producing these.
They are now producing and selling the livestock feed to local farmers that rear chickens and demand for their products is booming! Earning them a much needed income that they will invest as a group. They are literally turning the trash around them into treasure! Clearing their streets of the nuisance caused by the burning rice husks and turning it into the “gold” that is feeding the livestock being produced.
This is one of the numerous stories of impact that come out when young people are empowered to look at problems from their local communities and think of solutions that would last! It’s a testament of the potential the local youth have to turn problems they face in their communities into opportunities for impact and income generation.
