Mary Niambura

I wouldn't say it's easy to raise money.

It's not.

Because, again, you have to prove the case.

There are down days where you feel like you want to give up, but you remember why you're doing this.

70% of my workforce are women and people always encourage me, Madame, we have to keep going.

We manufacture biomass briquettes from agricultural waste such as sodas, macadamia shells, rice husks, all this aggregated together to form the beautiful biomass briquette, which is used by the B2B market.

I think mine was derived from curiosity with zero shillings.

Because when we went to our grandma's place, we used to dump all this charcoal dust in one side.

And then I read on the internet, cow dung can be a binder.

And I just mixed the two with my both hands and were able to look at the dairy.

And voila, EcoChurch was formed.

So the first batch I made was now chako balls, which is now from cow dung and chard dust.

This we used to cook in the village.

So the first meal I cooked was idiri, which is just a mixture of beans and maize in Kenya.

And then progressed now to chard dust and molasses so that people can buy.

Because when people hear cow dung, they're like, eh.

We cannot buy cow dung from here.

So I went to making with molasses.

Now I was able to sell to chicken farmers.

So it was class one, class two, now class three where we are at.