Creating a society who knows where their foods come from
If you are interested in Dihoai Co-operative you can contact Nelson Tsepa for more information on dihoaicop@gmail.com or 083 335 2060.
Nelson Tsepa (40) originally from Lesotho but lives in Westbury for the past ten years has started his own agricultural mentorship and business called Dihoai Co-operative. Dihoai is the Sesotho word for ‘Farmers’.
“I grew up in Lesotho with an uncle who is a qualified Agriculture inspector. At home, he had a big yard where we used to plant vegetables and that’s where I got involved in it all. Even at school, we had agriculture as a subject in high school so I took that also. Unfortunately, when I was in matric my uncle passed away so I lost the mentorship in the agriculture field.”
“I got influenced by my peers and did other things and that’s where I lost touch with it until years ago when my love for farming was revived. Its quite an interesting story because what brought me back was that I was in marketing and sales and the company that I used to work at had retrenchments and there was nothing I could do.”
“I was unemployed and frustrated and my brother in law and sister sat down and we spoke about what we could do. We discussed bringing vegetable gardens to schools in our community, we went around the schools in the community but they said no.”
“We then came to the Westbury Youth Centre and found people who were like us and wanted to make the garden work and the moment I stepped into this garden I felt something like a rebirth. I felt so much peace and knew that this has to be more than just a garden. This was about two to three years ago,” explained Tsepa.
Tsepa had a partnership with the youth centre to have mentorship for those students who were interested in agriculture. Since then Tsepa explained that it has been tough when it comes to financing with starting the business but they’ve been networking and formed partnerships with entities such as the City of Joburg within the Farmers Forum.
Nelson Tsepa from Dihoai Co-operative in the garden of the Westbury Youth Centre.
Tsepa is now part of a five-year mentorship with an organisation from America called ‘United Way’.
“They will be mentoring such business wise and then technically. We started with the commercial side where we sold vegetables, we still do but we wanted more for the company so we decided to do research on how we could help the community and we found very alarming figures where we found that the average age of a farmer in South Africa is 63 years. We thought, ‘what if we were co-ordinators who brought the youth into the industry?” Tsepa added.
Tsepa is currently looking for a place where they could train their students and teach them the basics of agriculture.
“You can not love something that you don’t know so that’s we want to introduce it to the youth,” he said.
According to Tsepa, one of the matriculants in 2016 from Westbury High found interest in the garden and now she’s studying agricultural studies in Stellenbosch. This encouraged Tsepa to continue with the programme.
“The idea is to have a generation that knows where their foods are coming from and to teach them the importance of eating organic food, even if we don’t plant the foods ourselves but just know where to get them,” concluded Tsepa.
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