or crazy. Take your pick.

Aganga chimed in: “You could say it was our secret sauce!”

The company is still building back from that setback, but they are on track to double their sales year-over-year. They now sell locally and internationally, through Amazon, and are working to get their product into large retail chains both in Botswana and around the U.S.

“We are currently in a stage of expansion, despite all those difficulties,” Aganga said.

Monthe chimed in this time: “We are tenacious or crazy. Take your pick.”

Whichever one it is, it’s working. Maungo Craft is the first food safety-certified company in Botswana in the natural and organic sector.

They have won 13 industry awards – 11 of those when they were still making jam at home – and they are the first Botswana-based food company to sell on Amazon.

From the very start, though, Monthe and Aganga saw Maungo Craft as more than just a business. They see it as a way to transform their country and their home.

Botswana’s economy is dominated by diamond mining, but that industry is not sustainable and often leads to exploitation of local resources and workers. Meanwhile, other more sustainable industries, such as local food production, are ignored. Botswana imports 98% of its food while indigenous crops like marula fruit go underutilized and under-commercialized. In the current global food market, 85% of food comes from just five crops.

The impacts, Aganga said, are economic as well as cultural.

“It’s about getting people to reconnect with what maybe their grandparents have eaten but maybe they are not familiar with,” Aganga said. “We can support our local communities if their resources are valued, but when their resources are not valued, those communities become subject to more harmful industries, like mining.”

Through Maungo Craft, Monthe and Aganga partner with local villages and employ thousands of women during harvesting season. They also work with processors extracting oil from marula fruit to take their discarded pulp and upcycle it into Maungo Craft products.

Their next mission is to help other local companies thrive and make a community impact the way they have. Aganga is the secretary of the Natural Products Association of Botswana, and Monthe is an active member. They are sharing everything they’ve learned with other small businesses in the natural, organic, indigenous products space, with the ultimate goal to build a new, export-based economic sector in Botswana that capitalizes on all the local, historical, and indigenous strengths the country has to offer.

And soon they will be doing it not just as business partners, but as a husband-and-wife team. After years of friendship and working together, Monthe and Aganga were engaged last spring.

We'll keep exploring the topic of Con dence to Impact Your World through conversations with more valued members of our Eccles community. The season debuts March 16, with new episodes every other week. Join us at eccles.link/businessbuzz

In a Spring 2022 survey of graduating seniors, 25% of respondents indicated they had gone hungry at least once in the previous year due to lack of sufficient financial means to buy food.

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