At the request of community leaders from many village areas Tiamoyo Empower Project has been established to bring business and agricultural economic development to village communities.

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There is a high proportion of women in the villages working hard to support the children emotionally, and financially.  Many are single-mothers, or widows and many more still have ‘adopted’ other children who have been orphaned due to high Aids infection.

Encouraging, training, supporting and empowering these women, emotionally and financially will return many benefits to the community.

Hence our motto,  “Empowering Leaders - Transforming communities”

 

Statement of development needs/issues
In many on the higher rainfall areas of Tanzania there is an abundance of avocados.  These established trees were often self seeded and are mostly of unknown or mixed varieties but produce much fruit as well as providing shade and soil stabilisation on the sloping areas.

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While the fruit is eaten in the local area, there is a surplus that is often left to rot or fed to the animals as the fruit has limited storage, and transports poorly.  Most villagers can not afford the transport to get them to market and as the fruit bruises easily it does not fetch a high enough return to make it economical even if they did have access to a vehicle.

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This fruit is a valuable and readily available resource. Which we can be utilised by turning it in to oil, which can then be stored, transported and sold. Making avocado oil is a highly labour intensive process, and required a filtration or separation machine but it does not require any other inputs hence it is a great option in low income villages. Avocado oil is a much sought after resource for the western food and cosmetic market. Currently countries like New Zealand and Australia, who produce high quality eating avocado oil can sell their product for Aus$50-120per litre, depending on quality and organic status.Lower quality oil is used by the cosmetic industry worldwide for products such as soap, moisturisers, hair products etc.

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By empowering the community to take ownership of the company we believe we will avoid similar issues as local people need not worry that foreigners are taking over.

Initially we worked with a pilot group of women to perfect an extraction technique using small manually operated milk separators to separate the oil from the water in the fruit.  During this time the women used the oil themselves or sold it locally. We now hope to raise funding to purchase a larger malaxer and filtration unit similar to those used by western countries to produce a high quality product.

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