Inspiring forestry students to embrace beekeeping

Whilst I was a student on the Diploma program at Zimbabwe College of Forestry (ZCF), I learnt about the great importance that bees and trees have for our daily lives – in short that we cannot do without bees and trees.

My passion for working with bees and trees led me to the role of Operations Director at Working for Bees – a partner organisation of Bees for Development. My task as a forester and beekeeper is to work towards protecting and saving bees and trees to achieve sustainable livelihoods for people around us.

Morat speaking at Zimbabwe College of Forestry

As a former student at Zimbabwe College of Forestry I was invited to be a part time lecturer at the college to the final year Diploma students. I presented on entrepreneurship focusing on my work since I left the college in 2019. When I left the ZCF, job opportunities were scarce in the forestry industry. This forced me to try other things to earn a living. I had acquired the relevant skills and knowledge from ZCF, and an exciting opportunity came up working for Working for Bees as Operations Manager and Product Developer. I started working with bees in the forest, tree planting and on bee related products including honey, honey wine, floor polish, shoe polish, hair food, honey coated ginger biscuits, roasted nuts coated with honey, honey coated biltong, honey mixed with orange juice, bees wax, body lotion and candles.

It has been always my dream to be back at the college to share with students how life as an entrepreneur is like out there. Meeting college students excited me and gave the students some inspirational moments that they will ride on when they complete their studies and get into the working environment where there may be a lack of employment.

Zimbabwe College of Forestry students hearing about Morat’s experiences

Members of the women’s beekeeping group that Morat works with at Working for Bees

At the college, beekeeping is being done as a subject but not as a course. Because of this, whenever students go through the subject they are not taught about value addition and bee related products. Students and lecturers got extrememly motivated when they saw several bee products coming out from my bag and wondered if all the products came from the honeycomb. Several questions were asked which included; my motivation to be an entrepreneur, my line of business, business startup and funding, challenges and how to overcome them and my advice to students. My key points to students were, start small and grow slowly, monitor performance, be flexible, innovative and adaptive and develop own way of doing things to remain competitive. Moving forwards, Working for Bees will be present during organised college events where we will share our knowledge with students and showcase products.

What we have started at the college has enabled Working for Bees and the Zimbabwe College of Forestry team to be motivated to start looking at developing the beekeeping subject into a course at certificate level.

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Morat with Zimbabwe College of Forestry students and lecturer