Our story
Avomeru is a social enterprise that started in 2015 with the aim of providing a reliable source of income to rural farmers while uplifting their self-worth by collaborating to produce premium avocado oil.
Our Vision- Hope, flourishing livelihoods and identities of pride bursting within the farming communities we engage with.
Our Mission – To be a holistic social business that produces high quality avocado oil and adds value to villages by giving farmers reliable earnings and the peace of mind they ever so deserve.
Our Story of Why
To explain the roots of how Avomeru’s was first conceptualized, we must take you back to Leguruki in the 80’s.
Leguruki is a Tanzanian community found between Mt. Meru and Mt. Kilimanjaro, where a little boy name Jesse Oljange grew up.
Growing up in the farming village to a farming family, he saw how they worked tirelessly throughout the seasons. And he saw how his parents and neighbouring farmers had to fight for meagre earnings for the harvests they had already laboured so hard to produce.
As he became older, he began recognizing how this cycle kept happening over and over, keeping the people in his community stuck in survival mode, fostering a sense of shame and hopelessness towards village life.
When he was quite grown, he began having opportunities to travel outside his home community and outside Tanzania and one day attended a design summit where he learned that oil can be produced from Avocados.
And he recalled the mounds of rotting avocados he would often walk by in his childhood.
Sparking an interest and curiosity that led to the creation of Avomeru.
He quickly came to understand the reason all those Avocados were literally wasting away was for the following reasons:
a) they were local varieties which have the characteristics for a short-shelf life, preventing them from being of interest to the export market
b) farmers in and around his community were not avocado farmers, they focused on growing coffee and maize, and just had a few avocado trees to provide their crops shade
c) if they were keen on trying to sell their harvest to local market, the transport logistics involved made their profit minimal at best and a loss at worst
And so, he put two-and-two-together, realizing the potential for village farmers to be supplemented with reliable earnings by turning their under-utilized avocados into high-earning oil, while also fostering a sense of opportunity, hope and pride in Leguruki.
Since this vision, Avomeru has grown and expanded to encompass and build relationships with farming villages across 12 regions across Tanzania, currently working with more than 8,000 farmers in 8 different regions.