Solomon Ssekamanya is a Ugandan social entrepreneur, business mentor, and co-founder of EverGrow Organics, a social enterprise revolutionizing Uganda’s agricultural sector through organic and agroecological farming practices.
With a background in international relations and diplomacy, Solomon pivoted to agriculture after witnessing firsthand how climate change and synthetic fertilizers devastated his family’s farm and income.
Today, he is committed to empowering smallholder farmers with sustainable solutions, such as EM Super organic fertilizer and Farm Power animal supplements.
Solomon Ssekamanya shared with Today Africa the story of EverGrow Organics and how it all began.
Could you please tell us about yourself?
Solomon Ssekamanya is the co-founder at EverGrow Organics today. And I’ve really developed a lot with the knowledge I’ve gotten, which has helped me to also support others, something that I like doing so much.
So today I’m also a social entrepreneurship educator, trying to teach others about social entrepreneurship and also have thriving projects in the country, in the world at large.
I’m also a business coach and a business mentor, basically trying to support emerging entrepreneurs to streamline and have working projects that are solving world problems.
And we do this after identifying the different social problems in the communities. And then they turn these problems into opportunities to come up with social enterprises.
But basically today, I’m here as a co-founder at Evagorganics, a social enterprise that is aiming at revolutionizing Uganda’s agricultural sector positively.
Tell us about Evergrown Organics, including your products and services
Basically Evergrown Organics, like I said initially, is a social enterprise that is aiming at revolutionizing the Ugandan agricultural sector.
So we come from an agricultural sector that is really right now not predictable at all. Back then we really had a lot of predictions of the seasons. We really knew that the soil was fertile enough.
We really knew that the markets were viable. But then today it’s changing. This is because of climate change. Talk about chemical agriculture right now. There’s a lot of imports that are coming in over chemical or synthetic fertilizers which are really affecting our lands.
A lot of challenges when it comes to farmers who are at the core front of having this industry move forward. They are quite limited by the trends in the agriculture sector today.
The markets are not very good. What they are producing today is not being sold in the markets. Their souls are dying off. And something that makes them vulnerable and unable to cater for their family’s basic needs and also offer quality education to their children.
So this is something that keeps them in a vicious cycle of poverty as something that is not ought to be because for us here in Uganda, agriculture is the backbone of our motherland.
And then seeing the smallholder farmer who is really at the core front of solving this problem and supporting us having thriving food systems here, it becomes very, very hard for them to thrive.
So with all these hardships, we were like how about start up a social enterprise or an initiative and that gave birth to Evergrow Organics?
And you are like, why not come up with a social enterprise that is solving all these problems for the smallholder farmers? With this, we’ve managed to come up with different solutions.
So we are promoting agroecological practices, promoting organic farming, and promoting permaculture. We also sensitize farmers about the different ways that we can have a thriving agricultural system that is eco-friendly and also solves world problems.
Because today when we look at what we’re eating, we’re eating a lot of toxins, having a lot of aflatoxins in our food today. How about coming up with a solution that is eco-friendly, that is also friendly to our bodies and it is having healthy food as well.
We came up with different products and services alongside this. So at the core front is EM Super, which is a mineral-based organic fertilizer that is rich in useful microorganisms. These microorganisms suppress all the harmful pathogens, thereby making soils healthy for better crop growth.
And we also have Farm Power, which is an animal immune booster that supports animals to have better digestive systems, better digestion in the bodies, and provide those quality nutrients that we need in the animals.
And with this, they have healthier growth and also live in great working environments. So we also couple this with the farmer sensitization. We also offer this service to support farmers to really understand the challenging trends today.
How can we have a better agricultural system? And why should we go organic instead of going synthetic? So with all those sensitization, it supports farmers to really understand and also evolve gradually.
Because this is a space that farmers are not yet very much conversant with, but with our awareness campaigns and some other key players and stakeholders, we are trying to revolve and come back to the normal of having a thriving agriculture sector.
We also offer extension services. Some farmers are quite very busy with their activities and then they are having agriculture that they need to perform.
So we do contract farming, they hire us and then we do contract farming. They later come back with the yields ready and they are just taking off and are selling to their markets.
Basically those are some of the services that we are offering and we also train farmers. It also comes down to the smallholder farmers and also those farmers that have smaller spaces.
We do what we call backyard gardening, training them about how to use the smaller space to come up with a very good yield.
And how you can use a very small space to have a source for yourself and your family when it comes to growing vegetables, tomatoes, onions and stuff like that.
So basically that is what we’re doing at EverGrow Organics, the services and the products that we have.
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Beside helping the smallholder farmers, is there any other thing that inspired you into venturing into this?
Yeah, this is a story I keep on sharing with all other people that I normally engage with. Personally, I come from a family that used to depend on agriculture for generations. And this was basically in order to sustain a better life and a better living.
I would say that I was a beneficiary of this agricultural system at home. But then it is not something that is appetizing today. And it is not something that is supporting my younger siblings at school.
Also my family access the basic needs that they need. So with time, our agriculture and our agricultural soils became quite not fertile enough. After my research, I found out that it was because of the climate change that is here today.
When I talk about the synthetic fertilizers that my family used to use on a daily basis and very frequently. In the long run, they were depleting our soil fertility.
Our souls today are no longer fertile enough to produce the food and the use that we used to produce. And since it was the only economic activity that we are doing, the levels of incomes reduced gradually.
Today it is quite a family that is not so happy. I have siblings today who are not in school simply because the bread winning economic activity was shattered and that was agriculture.
So this really inspired me so much that even when I’m looking and solving a problem for small-holder farmers, it starts with me and my family.
So I would wish that my family continues to be thriving the way it was. But then because of the sector that we are in and how we used to behave and what we used to do, it really became something very hard.
Today it’s quite unfortunate that we’re no longer getting the yields and the bountiful harvest that we got. And this is really limiting when it comes to sustaining the family.
“EverGrow Organics is a social enterprise that is aiming at revolutionizing the Ugandan agricultural sector.”
So this is a story that I continue sharing and I continue telling people definitely because that’s where the passion started from. Today, I’m a graduate. I managed to go to school.
I got some sponsors who supported me to go to school. And I did a course around international relations and diplomacy during my bachelor’s degree.
But then I found out that this is something that would be good, yes, but then definitely it goes back to the roots. And where does it start from? Where does my family come from? Where do I come from?
If I solve the problems of the country like Uganda, maybe through diplomacy, am I solving the problems of my family? Am I solving the problems of other individuals that are going through the same situation like my family?
I was like, no, so I went back to agriculture to support these small-scale holder farmers so that we can have thriving families, educate their children, and get opportunities just like any other middle income earning families in Uganda.
I found it very interesting and that’s how I came up with this passion deriving from the birth and growth of EverGrow Organics in 2021.
What were the challenges you faced in the beginning of starting up EverGrow Organics and how did you overcome them?
I think that’s a very important question that even other fellow entrepreneurs would be able to learn from. It’s never easy. The start and the journey is never easy at all.
So first of all, I will start with what I’ve gone into and then theoretically and practically what was something that I was going into. I was in international relations and diplomacy.
Go to school, research, do presentations, learn about the foreign policy analysis, learn about how the US is fighting China and Russia and stuff like that. It was a different background.
Then today, you’re talking about agroecology, you’re talking about agroforestry, you’re talking about microorganisms, you’re talking about permaculture, you’re talking about these principles of organic farming.
“At the core front is EM Super, a mineral-based organic fertilizer rich in useful microorganisms.”
It was really a very different world. It was challenging, I would say. Because my brain was kind of twisted into something different and now entering into something different.
It required me to do a lot of research, do a lot of reading, do a lot of discovery, do a lot of different things that would support me, engage myself into the new venture that I’ve gone into.
This really was something challenging. But then, like I said, through research, that is how I overcame this problem. And through realigning my passion with what I am doing right now, because that’s where it all starts from.
If you don’t have passion for anything, it becomes very hard for you to come up with something. And I developed a little passion. I remembered my background, so I used my story also to realign myself into EverGrow Orgonics.
Then the other challenge was around teaming up. It’s a new venture and I’m someone who doesn’t believe in micromanagement. I believe so much in teamwork. I believe so much in working together with others on a certain goal.
So that we have a big vision that we can all reach out to together. It was challenging having someone who believed in the idea.
But then as time went on, I found out that there’s a very passionate young lady who was really willing to positively change the status quo of Uganda’s agricultural sector.
She’s called Susan Nassolo, a young woman that I’m really very proud of because of how we are doing work today. Like I said initially, I’m a co-founder. It means I found this with someone else.
And that someone is Susan. So Susan was very much willing to support. She has been there all the time we’ve worked together ever since inception until today.
So she has seen a lot of milestones. We’ve seen a lot of success come our way because of the teaming up. My advice would be that if you are teaming up, team up with someone that you align with.
The person your purpose, passion, and vision aligns with theirs. The rest will work out themselves directly or indirectly. So those are the major two that we found out.
Then maybe the third one is something we all talk about as entrepreneurs. We call it startup capital. My understanding is that capital is not only about money.
Capital is something around the intellectual capital, the brains, the social capital and all other kinds of capitals. But then let me talk about the money.
It’s the money to start, the money to insect, the money to innovate, the money to produce products, the money to do research and all that. So that was really a very big challenge.
And surely we try to bootstrap, we try to use a lot of available resources, not thinking that everything’s about money, but everything is about what is available today.
So what was available was that we had the space that we could research from. We had people that we used to socialize with, understand and support. We also had the community.
A community of farmers that we were talking to, both the smallholder farmers and the commercial farmers. So these people supported us to make a lot of customer discovery, to really understand what is the problem.
What is the cause of the problem that they are facing? That is how we meant to identify and understand that it is because of soil depletion that these farmers are not having bountiful harvest because the soils are no longer fertile enough.
That is another way that supported us to overcome the problem that we had faced. We managed to pitch and had our first grant. It was a very minimal amount of Ugandan Shillings.
But then we effectively used that grant to support the business, build on that, and then come up with a bigger thing. So that is all supporting us to derive towards achieving our vision and mission today.
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What really convinced you that Suzan was the right person to be on this journey with?
There are three or four that I can talk about. One was her passion and desire for agriculture. This was something that she loved so much. It was something that was inbuilt in her that was moving through her blood vessels.
She was breathing and believing in agriculture. So for me, that was one of the best things that I can really feel proud of and things that really pushed me and supported me to say that Suzan is the best partner I can at EverGrow Organics.
“We also offer Farm Power, an animal immune booster that supports animals to have better digestive systems and healthier growth.”
Her background also comes from an agricultural background. She’s a person that started this journey even way back before understanding or before knowing that she can start up an initiative like EverGrow Organics at a very tender age of around 16.
She was moving with her mother to different agriculture shows, agriculture awareness campaigns, and she was a very big advocate of organic farming as well.
So she saw this as a problem way too back even before me realizing that it was a problem. So with such intelligence and such an attitude, it was really inevitable for me to work with her. And today we are still working together.
Then the other element I can talk about is the element of gender. We are so much gender sensitive in EverGrow. When you look at our recruitment, females are quite more than the males, simply because when you talk about agriculture today, we have over 7.5 million smallholder farmers in Uganda.
And surprisingly, over 70% of them are female. It means that gender sensitivity has to be something that is put at the core front. It is very easy for a woman to understand the woman’s needs, and what a fellow woman passes through, unlike the gents.
So with this, we were likely, surely the team has to be having female gender so that we can have a benchmark and have a very good element when it comes to male and female on the team.
That was something that I considered so much. I’m not saying that working with male is bad. But then working with females is good. Also, depending on the sector that you’re working in.
Because we also have men on the team, and they’re really working out tremendously well. Something that I appreciate so much. That is the second element that I looked at.
The third element is the drive. Suzan is someone that has the drive and that is visionary. She’s someone that has good listening skills and can execute even when you have a task. She’s also very good at marketing and very good at farmer outreaches.
With these elements I didn’t have a second thought and a second option of thinking of any other person apart from Suzan. So I’m very proud of her. She’s one of the people that are making a great impact in EverGrow Organics.
Today she’s a director at EverGrow Organics, just like I am, and we are still working together.
Why the name EverGrow Organics?
I think you’re the only person that has asked me that question ever since I started this journey. I give credit to you because it has hidden meaning and surely I think something that I can also share today because I’m sharing it to Africans.
And I’m sharing it to other innovators, entrepreneurs, and other people in Africa. So as a pan-Africanist, I’m really willing to share. Like I told you, we did a lot of customer discovery so every time that we went to farmers, they were crying over their yields, which were very small.
Their crops were always stunted. Their crops were not as good as they would wish them to be. Every time we went, it’s something that I can say in Luganda as a local language, but then I will interpret in English.
So they were like, “Ebimera tebyakulira” meaning that our crops are not growing. We were like, ah, why not start up an enterprise and an initiative that supports them to ever grow their crops?
So in ideation we are like, so why not join ever grow and then since we wanted to have something that is organic.
“Capital is not only about money. Capital is intellectual, social… But yes, the money to produce, innovate, research—that was a big challenge.”
Since we wanted to revolutionize Uganda’s agricultural sector through agroecology and at the forefront of them being organic farming, we were like, why not have their crops ever grow organically?
So we are like evergrow organically, but it sounded like a mission, a tagline, or a motto. Then we were like, how about it being evergrow, but then using organic solutions. So that is how we came up with EverGrow Organics.
Today we even added something EverGrow Organics Agroecology Limited. So that is how we came up with the name.
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Since you launched, what strategies have worked in attracting and retaining customers?
One of the best strategies and one that we are using today is doing farmer outreaches and awareness campaigns in the farmers. Today we are operating a B2C model because of the different challenges that we have found out in a B2B model.
When it comes to business to business, it is really very challenging. But business to customers, it is something that has really worked out for us. How has it worked out for us?
So we have a series of different awareness campaigns that we make. We do this through reaching out to farmers because farmers in Uganda, and I think also farmers in any other African country, have what we call different associations and they also have different farmer groups.
This is a group of around 40 to 50 farmers that come together and form up a group that will support them to walk this journey together. So we go to those groups and preach the gospel of organic farming.
Through preaching the gospel, we also market our products while delivering that service. So as we are delivering that service, we market and then farmers are also able to understand why they should buy our products. That is one strategy that we’re using.
Then the other strategy is that we are partnering with different agricultural based organizations that deal with farmers also. So with this, we try to promote our products. We try to have contracts.
We try to have formal partnerships with them, have a memorandum of understanding so that we can become the official suppliers of organic inputs to their companies.
So with this, these farmers at these organizations are able to purchase from us and then also deliver the service and deliver the products to their farmers in their different localities.
The other ones are quite expensive which is the door to door marketing and it’s quite expensive though it is something that we use. We are trying to use a lot of recommendations.
We also try to collect a lot of customer testimonials so that we can also give those testimonies to other farmers and then they are able to relate and also purchase from us.
So that is how we market also. Basically, we try to market on social media, like LinkedIn, but then our farmers are not so much on LinkedIn. And it is very hard for us to achieve this through marketing via LinkedIn.
But then we’ve not also gone in-depth with social media. And it is something that we are developing right now. Also with TikTok today, the only question is, is it really satisfying? Is it really reaching out to the target audience that we are reaching out to?
We also have a website where we try to share links for people to see your work and we are still developing it as well. So basically those are kind of the marketing tools that we are using so that you can reach out to many farmers.
How do you get the waste used in producing your products?
Food waste is something that we have in our country as well. We have collection points at public restaurants and public schools. We also collect food in the streets and the dumping site.
This supports us to make mass production. So we don’t collect food on a daily basis but then we collect food when we are going to do production. In the meantime, as we’re not doing production, we collect this food and store it in different places.
“Even when I’m looking to solve a problem for smallholder farmers, it starts with me and my family.”
What we do is that we ferment that food and improve its shelf life so that it doesn’t rot. So that when it comes to production, we have a lot of food that we’re going to use to create different solutions.
And among the solutions is the fertilizer itself. So this is something that supports us to collect a lot of food and we don’t have food waste in our community. Because if you look at the logic and the theory behind food waste, it is actually very dangerous.
Food waste is something that is also bringing climate change. And this is something that people don’t know.
A lot of dangerous chemicals, when you talk about gases like methane gas coming out of this rotten food, when it goes to the atmosphere, it damages the ozone layer and stuff like that.
So since we are organic and since we want to have a very good climate, we do food collection and then we store it and use add value to come up with solutions like the fertilizer.
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How is your business doing today and what does the future look like?
We are happy. We are glad. Our farmers are happy. We’re employing people and we are winning awards. And this is a testimony that people are seeing our work. It is a testimony that we’re doing something on ground.
Today in Uganda, we are the holders of the social enterprise award of the best agriculture project in 2024. So all these testimonies keep us going, motivate us on a daily basis, and make us feel like we are making an impact in the community.
However, what we are doing today is not even a quarter of what we would wish to do in years to come. So the vision looks like you want EverGrow Organics to become the leading agricultural company in Uganda, not only Uganda, but also in Africa.
We want EverGrow Organics to have its wings spread across Africa. Because I believe that 70% of the problems that our farmers are facing in Uganda could also be around 70% of the problems that other smallholder farmers are facing in other countries across Africa.
Because this is one continent, and if you look at the African Union, and the different agreements that we are having as Africa. I can talk of Kadap, we even had the referendum in Kampala, Uganda this very year.
That is different from the Maputo declaration in Angola. So it means that Africa has the same problem. And even if they’re not the same exactly, they are similarly the same. So we want to spread our wings across Africa.
But definitely I know and understand it comes with a lot of challenges. It comes with a lot of hard work. It comes with a lot of opportunities that we need to get rich and spread our information to the world.
And it comes with a lot of funding that we require and funding that we need. It comes with a lot of things, but at least we’ve tried to do some things and something that I’m proud of.
Today, we’ve had our products exported to Kenya, our neighboring country. And at least we have testimonials from Kenya. We have testimonials from another country apart from Uganda. So at least we are growing slowly and I believe we shall be there with time.
What are some key lessons that you learned in your journey as an entrepreneur?
I would say one is patience. Patience is very key. Things just don’t come overnight. You wake up one day and tomorrow you are EverGrow and it’s a brand that we are building.
You don’t just wake up and you are Today Africa. This is something that starts from somewhere. And for Today Africa to be where it is today, there’s been a lot of patience that has been done.
Today for EverGrow to be here, a lot of patience has taken place. So that is very key.
As an entrepreneur, don’t really fight so hard to see that you make an impact today. Fight very hard to see that you create an everlasting impact for tomorrow. Those two statements are very different.
And it only calls for patience to you to become who you are and have an everlasting impact for tomorrow and beyond.
The second lesson is that you need to have the right team. So having the right team is very good. If you don’t have the right business partners, if you don’t have the right team, you can never have a common mission.
You can never have a common vision. And at the end of the day, you will fail. You will not make it. We’ve seen a lot of projects that have been funded with a lot of money.
But then because of the team issues, separation and stuff like that, they definitely break off and then you don’t see the vision coming up. That is really a very big challenge.
Then the other one is social capital. One key lesson that I’ve learned is that you need to have a network. You need to have a network of people that believe in you. You need to have a network of people that trust that you can do something.
And you need to have a network of people that can recommend you even in your absence. Today, I’m a testimony and this testimony is between me and you. I’m here because of a recommendation.
Because someone trusted Solomon, it is a good platform where you can air out your views. A good platform where you can support other people across Africa. So that is what we call a social network. That is what we call social capital.
Today, a lot of opportunities come in, but they’re coming in because of recommendations. So if at all you don’t behave well, if at all you are not disciplined, or someone that is selfish, you get opportunities and you sit relaxed and you don’t feel like this is my opportunity.
You don’t share opportunities with others. There’s no way they can also share those opportunities with you. So having social capital is different, but then factors that support you to have that social capital are also different.
I cannot fail to talk about mentors and coaches. You can’t do it by yourself, sometimes you are limited by knowledge and understanding. You’re limited by research, limited by a lot of different factors.
That’s why you need to have a coach, a mentor, a role model, and people that you look up to. If at all you don’t have them, definitely it becomes really very challenging for you to achieve something big.
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