Exciting Phase Has Begun: Our Banana Fiber Extractors are Up and Running!

Dear friends and SHE family,

We are now moving straight forward to the extraction the banana fibers, which will help us to make our pads.  Banana fiber production is the key stage of our overall activities. The arrival of these machines is vital to our industrial-scale pilot: our machines can extract up to 50kgs per a day vs. 1 kg a day by manual extraction (using a machete).  

Our number 1 priority is to make sure that the fiber produced are clean and standardized so we will be working closely with the farmers throughout the entire production process. By working with SHE, banana farmers are now earning income from what was long-considered agro-waste. Our banana farmers will now be selling their fiber to SHE.

20th of September was the official start day of training our banana fiber suppliers, banana farmer co-operatives in Eastern Rwanda, how to use our extraction machines. Local authorities, including the Executive Secretary of the Gatore sector, Consolee Kanzayire, and the Sector Agronomist Frank Munganineza, also attended and encouraged co-operative members to leverage this business opportunity from SHE and to make this business successful. Based on the discussions I had with different banana famers, the added value to the banana is highly appreciated by the community. Check out a video demo of our trainings!

We are planning to set our production center in ETO Kibungo, where we will have different technicians, including SHE Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Abenezer Fanta, manage the full production facility. We are looking to train a few group of women entrepreneurs to help us produce final pads, we also hope that these trained women will be the trainers of other community around the country.

Thanks you for taking your time to read the blog!

-Sylvere, Junior Business Development Analyst