inBUSINESS Issue 14

ENTREPRISE
Kooagile of Monate Wa Temo
Her small-scale milling plant takes its name from the cornucopia that follows
a good harvest that she uses to produce award-winning sorghum meal, writes
ONONOFILE LONKOKILE
Atamelang Kooagile is a young
woman who shuns sloth
because she knows that God
frowns upon it and that hard
work will ensure that she stays
in business. Afterall, work is
worship.
After finding a niche in the sorghum
milling industry at Lesetlheng in her
native Molepolole, Kooagile knew she
was on the right track because two local
sorghum mills had recently closed down.
Kooagile revels in the fact that in the
oden days, milling was a labour of love
that women performed manually by
crushing corn (sorghum) on a grinding
stone. While this is still the case in
Botswana’s more traditional homesteads,
especially in the hinterland, milling is
done mainly by machine today where
small-scale millers exist side by side
with huge industrial plants like Bolux in
Ramotswa.
Kooagile is one such small-scale
miller who learnt from another smallscale
miller at Metsimotlhabe. She is
something of a cog in a low-intensity
war of the sexes in which women
are standing their ground. As milling
grew over time from the daily grind of
manually crushing corn between stones -
which was done primarily for household
consumption - to small-scale commercial
milling, women have held their own
against a male encroachment that they
seem to view as subversive.
They are adding on a synergy built
on a bedrock of gender divisions of
labour to defend their turf, as it were,
and taking advantage of government
empowerment programmes. Kooagile
is counted among such women – fairly
young, focused and ambitious. In 2009,
she successfully approached the Youth
Development Fund for a P100 000
soft loan and established her smallscale
sorghum milling business that
she called Monate wa Temo. A literal
translation of this name is the Joy of
Farming, a nomenclature informed by
the contentment that flows from the
cornucopia that follows a good harvest.
“I didn’t think twice,” she says of the
name and the project itself. “I knew
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www.inbusiness.co.bw | Issue 14 | 2017