Africa-Press – Lesotho. TWELVE Lesotho youths who excelled in the Sebabatso Youth Entrepreneurship Programme are off to the YouthConnektAfrica 2023 summit in Nairobi, Kenya, The youth, who have been marked as business innovators, will represent Lesotho at the summit which starts tomorrow and end on Tuesday next week.
YouthConnektAfrica Hub is a pan-African platform that seeks to empower young people by enhancing their knowledge, experience and skills while investing in their ideas, innovations and initiatives so that Africa makes progress in harnessing its demographic dividends by 2030.
Hosted by the Government of Kenya in partnership with the YouthConnektAfrica Hub and UNDP, the sixth edition of the YouthConnektAfrica Summit is expected to convene over 20 000 young people, government officials, corporate leaders and development champions.
This year’s summit aims to spotlight youth leadership and innovation for Africa’s integration through policy discussions, storytelling and networking, and entrepreneur-focused programmes including a marketplace and investor meetings.
Among Lesotho’s youths who will be at the summit is a 33-year-old Tšoanelo Thonkha, the founder of SylRose Hatchery which sells day-old broiler chicks. SylRose Hatchery was established in 2021.
Thonkha told thepost before taking the flight on Tuesday that the business, a small-scale chicken hatchery company located in Thaba-Tseka, is managed by herself and co-founder Mphotleng Letuka.
“Our hatchery is currently focused on artificial hatching of broilers fertile eggs and selling one day old chicks, specifically broilers,” she said.
They sell chicks to poultry farmers in the highlands of Lesotho with the help of the latest technology of automated incubators. The process takes 29 days.
She said the vision behind this company is to empower small-scale poultry farmers of Thaba-Tseka and Lesotho at large by bringing poultry services closer to them.
She also said they want the company to be “a fully-intergraded poultry industry from hatchery to market”. “Our future goal is to complete the value chain strategy and be a fully integrated poultry industry from hatchery to slaughterhouse to the market,” she said.
Thonkha’s business idea won a prize of M45 000 during the Sebabatso initiative competition last month and she used that money to buy an incubator that she believes will help her grow Sylrose Hatchery.
“I consider ourselves lucky that we were exposed to such initiatives,” she said.
“It would be wise if the youths make sure not to miss such beautiful initiatives.
” She believes that the summit in Kenya will give her an opportunity to pitch her already existing hatchery business with the hope to get investors.
On the other hand, she hopes to learn from other people how they handle their businesses. She said unfortunately she will not be able to get a chance to exhibit her products “because of the ban of poultry products in the country”.
“There is nothing to exhibit. The only thing I will do is to give out our company profile and make sure I network,” she said. She said the ban on poultry products has seriously affected her business.
“What I don’t understand is why we are not allowed to import because in South Africa they are still up and running,” she said.
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