By Grace Ademulegun
With education at the centre of her passion, Martha Gaisie, a Ghanaian mushroom entrepreneur, spent her childhood reading as many books as she could and breaking academic records in her senior year.
Despite the fact that poverty hindered her ability to receive an education, Gaisie persisted and is now the founder and CEO of Healthy Choice Agro Consult, an oyster mushroom agriculture company.
Like some other environmental champions, she became interested in the issues she saw and experienced in her community. She started the company after seeing how the climate catastrophe affected her neighbourhood, where most people couldn’t afford irrigation and agriculture relied on the two wet seasons. This influence even extends to local children’s access to schooling.
“The weather has become increasingly erratic in recent years. After a prolonged drought, the wells dry up. A person’s entire farm may be destroyed by one of our bushfires,” she said, adding, “Insufficient rains or too much heat and sunshine in recent years have killed crops that had already germinated.”
Since farming is typically their only source of income, these had a significant impact on the lives of many people in her village, to the point that parents were unable to give their kids the supplies they required for school.
As a member of the CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education) Association of Women Leaders, she was able to participate in CAMFED Ghana’s Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at the University of Cape Coast in 2015 where she graduated with a Bachelor of Education in Science from the institution.
In 2019, she also launched her company with the Mastercard Foundation and CAMFED’s help.
Since many people consider mushrooms to be a delicacy, her company, Healthy Choice Agro Consult, which specialises in oyster mushroom agriculture, aims to make mushrooms available year-round so that people may acquire them whenever they want.
However, they are typically picked seasonally from the communities during the rainy season, straight from the wild.
500 bags of mushrooms were produced every three months when she started her business, but today they generate 3,000 bags every three months, or 12,000 bags annually.
They turn the harvest into dried mushrooms, powdered mushrooms, canned mushrooms, and even frozen mushrooms that can be shipped over large distances, she said in one of her interviews.
Martha, however, said that a major challenge they have faced is that their customers are from far away, and sending fresh mushrooms over a long distance is problematic because by the time they reach them, their colour and texture have changed. The resolve that has been made on this is using refrigerated vehicles to keep them in their fresh state.
“We use waste sawdust from nearby wood mills as compost, and after we have harvested the mushrooms the saturate becomes an organic fertilizer which I sell to farms in the community,” she said.
Despite all of her endeavours, her business has been flourishing, and she claims that aiding the underprivileged in society is what makes her happy and fulfilled.
Martha currently employs four men and three women, and she has trained them in every facet of the company, from bagging the mushrooms to preparing the compost.
She has been able to help four women launch or grow their own businesses and provide them with business coaching, including how to save money, manage finances, maintain records, reduce expenses, buy in bulk, and more.
In addition, her company is dedicated to another social aspect by aiming to donate five percent of its profits to the Empowered Youth Foundation, her foundation that supports young women in rural communities and has so far given three girls direct educational funding.
She also works to help younger women understand the importance of education without entering into unnecessary relationships that could result in pregnancy, and after just one year of implementing the program in two schools, all the girls completed and wrote their BECE without becoming pregnant, and the headmistress gave her feedback indicating that her program has been extremely beneficial.
Through her company, Martha hopes to teach a lot more people in mushroom production and inspire young people to pursue agriculture so that they will view it more favourably.