How rotting bananas brought relief to a town struggling with climate change
A medium wine with a sugary taste, but not overly sweet. That’s the way a wine enthusiast in Karonga – a town in northern Malawi close to the border with Tanzania – described a local liquor made from bananas.
In Muchenjeli, almost 15km away, a business born out of desperation and abundance is flourishing.
One Sunday morning, almost half a dozen women are stirring a mixture of what, in the next six months, will become a mature wine ready for the market.
“We started as a loans and savings cluster, a group of women doing small businesses,” says Emily Nkhana, vice chairperson for the Twitule COMSIP co-operative. The group of 40 members, who are mostly women, produce wine from a range of fruits. While banana is the favourite, the alcohol is also made from tamarind, pawpaw and baobab.
The group began in 2012 when they started producing wine after being trained by the COMSIP national HQ.
“We discovered that the wine business could work because there were not many people doing it and there was an abundance of fruits like bananas and local available ingredients,” Ms Nkhana says.
“We were also struggling to support our families including children with school fees and other basic needs,” she added.
Since then, the results have been astounding. The members’ livelihoods have improved through the construction of new houses as well as loans, and being able to buy livestock in some cases.
“We want to change [the face of] Karonga and Malawi. We should be able to educate our children and create employment for the young people,” says Eneless Makawanga, a member of the group.
The local co-operative currently makes around 100 litres of wine but aims to increase this to between 1,000 to 20,000 litres a month.
The brand sells at $3 (£2.30), per bottle and has captured the interest of people both from the surrounding and from other areas including Lilongwe, more than 370 miles away.
When the banana field close to Lake Malawi was washed away, the group decided to buy fruits from other farmers. Lemons are used as a preservative in the product.
Ms Makawanga said the wine is natural. But she described the process of distilling as “manual” and said it would be much easier if they were able to have a factory and a means of transporting the product to other places.
Mercy Chaluma-Kayuni, public relations officer for COMSIP, which supported the co-operative through a grant to set it up, described the process as “traditional” and said it was done without sophisticated machinery.
The wine includes fruits, raising agents, yeast and lemons. Firewood is still used to boil water to make the wine, which is then stirred, sieved and fermented.
The members boast of the wine’s ability to aid digestion and eyesight, thanks to the natural ingredients. The sugar content is minimal and the winemakers claim it has no side effects – or hangover. Some among the group harbour ambitions of having their own orchard and are hoping they can export it to other countries.
The winemaking is an innovation born from necessity. Climate change has led to high temperatures and bananas ripening earlier than usual and then rotting, Ms Chaluma-Kayuni explained. “But wine has a much longer shelf life,” she said. “The returns are good as through Twitule they have a ready market to sell their bananas all year round.
“While they use other fruits for production in seasons, it is only banana that is available all year round, making it the dominant produced wine at the co-operative”.
It has also struck partnerships with tourist attractions in the region where they have put their wine on sale, with encouraging results.
However, Ms Chaluma-Kayuni said the local co-operative does not have a wine bottling facility. So COMSIP purchases wine in bulk from them and then arranges high quality bottling and helps them with marketing so that the wine can be sold at a good price.
“Being a union of co-operatives, COMSIP participates in so many of these fairs and always on display are improved wine bottles of Twitule wine,” she said. “This not only improves their market reach, but also ensures that they get more from their production than when they’re selling from their recycled bottles in their district.”
But she also said improved certification standards would help with marketability of the product.
“While these strides are being made, there is the challenge of lack of certification from the Malawi Bureau of Standards that is limiting the full penetration of the product on the market,” she said.
