Former RDC invests in chicken and mushrooms, inspires son

Adima in one of the houses where she keeps the broilers at Asuru village in Arua. PHOTO BY CLEMENT ALUMA 

Listening to Betty Adima, the former Resident District Commissioner (RDC) for Masindi and Nebbi, talk about rearing chicken and how much she has achieved, one would want to quit what he or she is doing to focus on raising chicken.
Though she learnt about poultry in 1960s while at Gayaza High School, Adima had never tried to practise.
It is only after serving in National Resistance Council (NRC) and Constituent Assembly (CA) in 1995 that she did.

“For the years I was in politics, what I did for myself was to buy a plot of land in Kampala. But I could not develop it,” she recalls.
The breakthrough came that year (1995) when a student, who she lent money for school fees, paid the debt of Shs700,000.
She asked for permission from the landlady from who she rented a house to set up a poultry business. She accepted on condition that only temporary structures are constructed.
From then, Adima has not looked back as proceeds from the chicken business have helped sustain the family.

She has been in position to pay school fees for her children when her husband passed away in 1996. She has also been able to complete construction of home on her plot of land in Kampala.
In 1998, the President appointed her an RDC in Masindi but she was hesitant to take up the appointment because her business was now thriving.

“I was getting Shs2.5m per month from sale of eggs and chicken. I was comfortable, but a friend advised me not to turn down the appointment,” she says.
Every weekend, she would travel to Kampala from Masindi via taxi to check on her family. With every trip, she observed that the passengers were booking spaces in the taxis for trays of eggs to Masindi. Yet she had her own in Kampala, which she could be selling with minimum risks.
So when she transferred her chicken to Masindi, she increased the number to 1,000 layers.

Satured market
Soon, she was selling an average of 45 trays of eggs per day in Masindi Town. But the market became saturated. She therefore had to expand the business to cover Kinyara and other trading centres in Hoima.

“With this, I was earning Shs5m per month. But in 2009, I was transferred to Nebbi as RDC. Though I wanted to maintain the scale of business I was doing in Masindi, I could not because my aides were instead taking the eggs and chicken; that is why I scaled down,” Adima explains.
In February 2014, she requested to retire from the RDC position.
Her passion for poultry has been re-ignited. Rearing chicken is what takes up much of her time now. She rears broilers and layers which she sells to major hotels in Arua and Nebbi.

Her son, Simon, even sold his motorcycle and invested the money in poultry business with his mother after seeing how much she was earning.
From the proceeds, he has since built himself a permanent house in the same compound in Asuru village, which is in the outskirts of Arua Town.
While in Nebbi, Adima, was a major supplier of eggs to Ugandan traders and the Congolese, who came from Mahagi town.
Apart from chicken, she also grows mushrooms that she sells in Arua and as far as Kampala through the network she has established.

editorial@ug.nationmedia.com