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Riches: From rags to food

Saturday November 18 2017
taal

Mommar Taal founded Tropingo Foods, which grew to become Gambia’s largest groundnuts processing and exports business by 2015, with an annual turnover of $1.6 million. PHOTO | COURTESY

By VICTOR KIPROP

University of York, Canada. The year is 2005 and Mommar Mass Taal, a 17 year-old Gambian student, is here to pursue his undergraduate degree in economics and development, in the footsteps of his father who was a diplomat in Kenya.

In his free time, Mommar prints T-shirts with images of his idols including Patrice Lumumba and Nelson Mandela. The clothing gains popularity among his friends and soon the entire 60,000-student campus wants T-shirts.

Mommar and his Tanzanian roommate called their business Malyka Clothing.

“Before we knew it, the business had grown beyond our campus to other campuses, to the whole country and within a few years we were already manufacturing in Bangladesh and selling in five different countries,” Mommar said.

Combining school with running a fast-growing multinational company proved too much for Mommar and he quit his studies to concentrate on the business.

“I wasn’t focused on school anymore. While the business was doing pretty well in Canada and the region, I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to create employment opportunities and value in Gambia, so I dropped out in my fourth year and came home to expand the clothing business.”

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On arrival in 2010, the young, visionary but naïve Mommar failed to get a foothold and lost all the money he had made from the clothing business in trade deals that went sour.

Groundnuts

Back in Canada, his clothing business dwindled due to lack of efforts to manage and grow it. With nothing to show after his first year in the Gambian business space, his parents were on his case for dropping out of school.

Mommar began to study the value chains in Gambia using knowledge from his undergraduate studies in Canada, and his sights turned to groundnuts — Gambia’s largest export commodity.

“I noticed that Gambia and by extension Africa had a huge agricultural gap because of exporting raw local products with little value addition, and so I set out to change the trend. But it was not going to be easy.”

After a few months of research into the sector, Mommar bumped into Cheng, a Chinese businessman who was exporting groundnuts from Gambia, and he agreed to mentor him.

“For two years I shadowed him, basically doing the dirty job of supplying the materials as I slowly learned the ropes of the export business. Impressed by my work, Cheng, upon his retirement in 2014, agreed to introduce me to the market in China.”

Having understood the market dynamics, and with a ready market for his produce, Mommar founded Tropingo Foods, which grew to become Gambia’s largest groundnuts processing and exports business by 2015, with an annual turnover of $1.6 million.

Not busy

Despite his success in the groundnuts sector, Mommar says the company was only productive for four months of the year during the groundnuts season.

“In 2013, I had written a business plan for a mango processing factory because I had realised that mangoes are the most grown fruit in Gambia, and most of them were going to waste during the season due to lack of markets.”

“Not only was a factory needed but in addition, the mango season begins immediately after the groundnuts season, meaning that Tropingo Foods was going to be busy for the whole year.”

With capital in hand — some sourced from the World Bank — and four years of research on mango value addition under his belt, Mommar built the processing factory in 2016.

Tropingo Foods now buys mangoes from the local farmers, dehydrates them at the factory to increase shelf life and exports than as slices to Nigeria.

“We successfully finished our first production cycle this year. We hope to scale up production and become the largest drier in West Africa, and we are looking to enter the European market soon,” Mommar said.

Budding entrepreneurs

“Malyka Clothing died a natural death because my Tanzanian and Bahamian partners also left Canada to pursue their businesses in their countries,” Mommar says.

“But I’m glad because all of us are now budding entrepreneurs in our home countries. My Tanzanian friend is running a thriving cashewnut factory in Tanzania, while the Bahamian is a successful video director with his own film company.

“I would say this has all been inspired by the desire to change our home countries using the knowledge that we gained abroad.”

For young and aspiring entrepreneurs, Mommar has a message: “Focus on your job. If you set out to do something, make sure you do it better than other people, not just in your country but in the entire world.”

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