“Be intentional. I ensure that my efforts are not just reactive but proactive, leading with purpose and making a difference - one deliberate step at a time.”
Pauline Otila, Founder and Managing Director, Apiculture Venture
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Founding year: 2018
Number of employees: 22
Website: Apiculture Venture
Revenue: USD 370,000 (2023)
Investment ask: USD 200,000 (debt)
Investment needed to:
- Grow supplier base by equipping and training farmers on modern beekeeping
- Carry-out extension services on honey harvesting, extraction, processing and handling
- Certification of new value-added products
- Purchase of mixing and filling machines
Products and services:
- Modern beehives, protective gear and beekeeping accessories
- Equipment for harvesting, extraction, processing and packaging of honey
- Private packaging and labelling services
- Theoretical and practical trainings on beekeeping
- Honeys and a variety of hive products (body jelly, lip balms, propolis, shower gel, bee bait, bee venom…)
- Apiary set-up and management services
- Offtake agreements with honey producers
- Pollination services
Enterprise portrait
Beekeeping plays a crucial role in supporting agricultural productivity and biodiversity through pollination services. However, beekeepers in Kenya have historically received little attention and support. Pauline Kamwala Otila, an entrepreneur driven to support economic empowerment of rural households and women, took note of this situation. She also realized that smallholder farmers who kept bees were overlooked by large companies in the honey sector and, as a consequence, struggled to find buyers for their products. She realized that this was an untapped market. This sparked the motivation to start her own company that would provide expert advice on modern beekeeping and a ready market for honey produced by smallholders.
Apiculture Venture Limited was founded in 2018 as a one-stop shop for the beekeeping value chain. Apiculture Venture is committed to helping beekeepers and smallholders create value in the beekeeping value chain and reduce the number of food insecure households in Kenya. The social enterprise manufactures beekeeping equipment, provides pollination services and beekeeping advisory and offers a ready market for honey producers. Apiculture Venture also processes and sells hive products under its signature Golden Bee brand. The company now works with more than 10,000 farmers across the country.
Key commercial activities
- Manufacture and sale of modern hives: Apiculture Venture manufactures and sells Langstroth hives and Kenyan Top Bar hives. They also manufacture brood boxes, catcher boxes, feeders and pollen traps.
- Sale of beekeeping equipment and accessories: Apiculture Venture supplies all necessary accessories for tending to hives, like bee suits, gloves, smokers, hive tools and more. They also sell machinery used for honey harvesting, handling, extraction and processing.
- Commercial beekeeping: Apiculture Venture runs a commercial apiary on leased land from which it procures honey and other hives products for its Golden Been brand.
- Processing and packaging of honey and value added hive products: Apiculture Venture processes and packages the honey it sources. Its own branded Golden Bee honey is sold in different sizes (10g, 20g, 40g, 250g, 330g, 500g, 1kg). The Golden Bee line includes premium products like creamed and comb honeys. Apiculture Venture also makes a wide variety of products for its Golden Bee brand, including lip balms, skin moisturizer, body wash, propolis tincture, bee pollen and even chocolate.
- Training on modern beekeeping: Apiculture Venture offers theoretical and practical trainings in modern beekeeping, covering a range of topics from site surveying and bee biology to harvesting and beekeeping entrepreneurship.
- Beekeeping extension services: Apiculture Venture conducts site surveys and feasibility studies and provides expert support with the setup and management of apiaries
- Pollination services: Apiculture Venture provides pollination services to farmers. The latter can purchase hives from Apiculture and the company will help with set-up and apiary management. Alternatively, Apiculture Venture can install already active hives (minimum of 25) on a farm for an agreed period of time.
- Private packaging and labelling: Apiculture venture offers private packaging and labelling services to other enterprises and SMEs.
Plans to grow the business
Apiculture Venture is on a strong growth path. From 2020 to 2023 the company just about doubled its revenue from around USD 187,000 to around USD 372,000. Moreover, the company’s average growth in revenue from 2021 through 2023 was about 8%.
Apiculture Venture aims to become the largest honey producer in East and Central Africa, and the Managing Director Pauline Otila is determined to achieve this.
Agroecology impact highlights
Apiculture Venture supports smallholder farmers to diversify their economic activities and earn a more stable income. Poor crop yields, fluctuating market prices and rising costs of agricultural inputs are factors that can negatively impact smallholder incomes, with knock-on effects on household food security. By providing equipment, training and support services, Apiculture Venture helps smallholders to take up an additional income generating activity that supplements their overall income. The company even draws upon its own resources to manufacture train smallholders and provide them with hives. In so doing, the company also grows its supplier base. Most importantly, Apiculture Venture guarantees a market for smallholders.
Apiculture Venture also indirectly supports strengthens the vital ecosystem service of pollination, by facilitating the adoption of beekeeping by farmers and honey producers. The pollination services provided by bees support both on-farm and off-farm biodiversity. Moreover, Apiculture Ventures cares for the welfare of bees and places them at the centre of beekeeping. They train beekeepers and smallholder to first consider the habits, natural behaviours and needs of the bees. Better care translates into healthier bee colonies, which also means getting the most out of the pollination services they provide.
Current challenges
When pursuing opportunities for Apiculture Venture, Managing Director Pauline Otila has run up against discrimination for being a woman entrepreneur that has limited growth opportunities. She has experienced discrimination in procurement, sales and tender processes where male-led businesses were systematically preferred for contracts. Even when attempting to acquire office and workshop space, she was unsuccessful until she had a male figure step in. As a woman entrepreneur, Pauline has struggled to be taken seriously simply because of the fact that she is a woman. On numerous occasions, she had stereotypes thrown at her, such as “women are not natural leaders”, “women are too emotional for business”, or even “women should focus on ‘soft’ roles like handling administrative duties”. As a result, she says that her business has been perceived as “small-scale” or a “side hustle”, making it hard when applying for funding, partnerships and contracts.
Financing track record
In the beginning, Apiculture Venture was able to open its doors for business with start-up capital from three sources – the founder’s personal savings, a capital injection from company directors, and a soft loan from family members. Showing great promise and impact, the social enterprise was awarded a USD 50,000 grant in 2022 from the United States African Development Foundation and Stanbic Bank, which was used to support 250 beekeepers in Tana River and expand its honey processing line. Apiculture Ventures has also received loans from CfC Stanbic Bank (KES 3,200,000), the Kenya Climate Innovation Centre (KES 1,356,000) and Ecobank Kenya Ltd (KES 1,000,000). In 2024, the company also emerged as a winner of the Agroecological Food Futures Prize, for which it received a USD 10,000 grant, which it plans to use for equipping and training farmers on modern beekeeping practices, marketing and sales of honey and wax.