Adding value to cooking melons in Botswana

There’s a melon in Botswana that produces more fruit in years of drought than in rainy years. Lerotse (Citrullus lanatus var. citroides) is a cooking melon which is commonly eaten in Botswana. In rainy years, it slurps up the water and takes long to flower and doesn’t fruit. But when drought hits, it gets stressed and decides it should produce some flowers as a mechanism to escape drought. 

With the changing climate, Botswana is getting drier and drier and that makes melon production, especially lerotse, very appealing to farmers. The people of Botswana now prefer traditional foods because they believe they are more healthy, and as a result the demand for lerotse is increasing.

Masego Ramolaise, a farmer in a village near Lentsweletau in southern Botswana, recognized that melons were underutilized. “In bumper years the majority of melons end up being left in the fields where they are fed to donkeys and cattle,” said Masego. “I thought if I could add value to melons, farmers could earn some income and thus produce more melons.”

To learn more about how to add value to the lerotse, she attended a training session organized by NARDI, Botswana’s National Agricultural Research and Development Institute, and the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA). 

“We organized a training course on food processing for farmers in the region,” said Ketseemang Safi, a horticulturalist with NARDI. “The training aimed at creating value chains for the crops grown by the farmers in order to increase their income.”

The training was conducted as part of a five-year project titled “Improving Agricultural Resilience to Salinity through Development and Promotion of Pro-poor Technologies” (RESADE). ICBA is working with national agricultural research systems in Botswana, The Gambia, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone and Togo to improve agricultural production and productivity and increase incomes of farming communities, particularly of women, in salt-affected agricultural areas. 

RESADE is implemented in partnership with ICBA and is funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA).

“At the training we taught Masego some recipes for various foods including how to make a juice from lerotse,” said Safi who serves as the RESADE coordinator in Botswana. “Masego and other farmers learned how to get the proper licenses to produce food and how to get a nutritional analysis. And they learned how to take their products to market.”

Masego came home from the training and promptly set up her business. “I set up a business called Makaba Lerotse Juice Product and obtained a trading license from the local municipality,” said Masego. “Now, I employ some helpers to produce the juice in quantities and sell it to people organizing functions like weddings.”

But Masego didn’t stop with lerotse juice. She saw that most local beer brewers were importing sorghum malt from South Africa. That seemed to be a lost opportunity as sorghum is one of Botswana’s main crops. So she purchased a milling machine and started adding value to the local sorghum by making and selling her own malt at a good profit.

“I believe that Botswana will plant more melons now that a new market is available,” said Masego “This will also ensure sustainability for my business as raw materials will be readily available.”