Matrida Mlotha is a 24 years old Malawian lady who was born and raised by her parents in Malawi. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Agribusiness Management which she obtained in 2019 from the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) – Malawi. She believes that entrepreneurship is a driver of socio-economic development of the country. After college, she thought of creating jobs and solving societal challenges by doing several entrepreneurial activities and she now owns a registered farm called Zomera Fruit Propagation Farm.

The farm produces seedlings of various fruits and among the seedlings are clean banana suckers. Bananas are widely grown by smallholder farmers in Malawi for food, income and nutrition. However, the growth of banana industry has been hampered by the outbreak of the Banana Bunchy Top Disease (BBTD) which has resulted to low productivity as farmers continued to plant infected planting materials (Masangwa, 2022).

This has resulted to a loss of 30,000 hectares of bananas and importation of 20,000mt of bananas each week (Pondani, 2022). Zomera Fruit Propagation Farm is now working on a project of producing clean, disease free banana planting materials through the macro propagation system of multiplying clean banana suckers. It also offers free banana planting and management services to its customers. This project started last where the farm managed to produce 1000 clean suckers. This project has stopped these smallholder farmers from worrying as to where they could find disease free (clean) banana planting materials. The farm now plans to be producing not less than 50,000 clean banana suckers each year.