The Sheka honey basin has a huge prospective for organic honey production for the years to come. The company targets to export 500 ton of processed organic Poly-flora tropical honey and 50 ton of organic beeswax every year.
Sheka Nordic has established an out-growers scheme in order to contribute to the socio-economic development of the surrounding area and also to ensure availability of main raw honey for the processing plant in the right quality and quantity.
The scheme is aimed at transforming the traditional beekeeping in the project area and surroundings into viable market-oriented modern bee farming which is able to produce high-quality apiary products in order to generate substantial and sustainable revenue inflows for the improvement of the economic livelihood of their communities. Sheka Nordic achieves this by building the capacity of smallholder farmers through various training and facilitating access to modern beekeeping equipment.
In general, Ethiopia’s divers’ agroecology has the potential to produce 500,000 tons of honey and 50,000 tons of beeswax per annum, but currently, production is limited to about 50,000 tons of honey and 4,000 tons of beeswax (MARD, 2011).