Real Agricultural Solutions for Africa (RASA) is a private company limited by shares that was incorporated in December 2013.
It was started by six bachelors of commerce students from Makerere University including Kyabasinga Moses, Otai Tegu Marcel, Kyewalabye James, Kaijage Josephat, Niwagira Breach and Mbonigaba Joshua.
This partnership was started with personal savings scheme where a fixed amount was saved on a weekly basis. With these funds, RASA ventured into a few business areas mainly agro distribution until currently when a focus was put on value addition to agro produce with coffee as a pioneer crop of interest. The company (RASA) deals in production of coffee liqueur branded LEGEND dark coffee liqueur, which is sourced from Ugandans finest coffee beans.
The idea of producing coffee liqueur was inspired by a call for proposals and business plan by the Consortium for enhancing University Responsiveness to Agribusiness Development (CURAD). They were mainly interested in ideas that would increase the consumption of coffee in Uganda and also add value to coffee. Coffee liquer seemed like a good way to achieve these two objectives and a business plan was sent into CURAD and it was approved.
Breakthrough
With the support from CURAD, the RASA team now focused on turning the idea into an actual product. They partnered with Makerere University Food Science and Technology and worked in close ties with Prof. Kyamuhangire to come up with a product. The product was developed and it was first online pharmacy canada ambien released to the public to get a taste of it at the lunch of CURAD in May last year. The product got a positive reception and many people were interested in consuming this.
From that stage, it was now time to taste the product on a commercial market and see how willing people would be to acquire this product when on sale. With support from CURAD, RASA was supported to produce products to display and sale at the annual Jinja agricultural show. This was the first time that the product branded “LEGEND” was released on the market. The response from this show was over whelming and all products were sold out.
RASA participated in the CURAD agribusiness Innovations Challenge and won first place in the category of the best new coffee product.
RASA has graduated from the Earn as you Learn Program to SME CURAD incubatee. RASA has received support to go into commercial production of LEGEND dark coffee liquer. This has helped increase the production capacity from two hundred litres a month to one thousand eight hundred litres a month. In addition, more business support is received in form of business mentorship, market linkages and any other challenges identified.
RASA plans to get into more automated production by getting state of the art production lines that are automated to increase its production capacity as the market grows. In addition, there is a long term plan to do more agro-processing and producing more product lines from different crops.