Born with strong entrepreneurial skills
Eben Ngula left his job to start his own business, African Grain Millers.
Monique Adams
With a natural inner drive to food security, Eben Ngula wanted to be involved in food production ever since his first year of tertiary education at the University of Namibia (Unam), where he studied agriculture.
After attaining a Bachelor in Agriculture degree at Unam, he moved to Aussenkehr in southern Namibia, where he was the production manager for Namibia Grape Company for years.
His responsibilities were to grow and export world-class, quality grapes. It was there that he learned about food safety, packaging and logistics. That inspired him to turn his vision into reality and start his own business.
Before starting his business venture, he made sure to do research about the product and the industry.
“I wanted to venture into flour production years ago. I then started to look into all the requirements to do so, from starting a company to what goes into production such as raw materials,” he says.
The reason why he started African Grain Millers was because he knew Namibia has a very harsh environmental reality with its dry arid conditions. That led to the idea of contributing towards something that is consumed by more than 50% of the country, which is mahangu.
African Grain Millers currently has eight employees. Ngula humbly says he has not accomplished anything yet.
In the next five years Ngula hopes to see African Grain Millers becoming one of the biggest milling companies in the country, with an extremely talented team.
“One of the challenges I faced was trying to penetrate the market, especially when retail owners were hesitant to meet with us due to Covid-19, let alone shelf our products, so we had to improvise and change our communication and pitch a strategy with our marketing team to a more virtual approach,” he says.
The reason why he left his previous job was because he noticed that he contributed tremendously towards his previous employer’s success while working there, so he told himself that if he put the same effort into his own venture, he could go even further and have a greater impact on society on his terms.
“My advice to young aspiring entrepreneurs is that having ideas without starting is worthless. It’s the execution that brings home the gold; the most important step is launching your business. Once your business is launched, you can figure everything out afterwards because of the current uncertain times we are facing,” he says.
With a natural inner drive to food security, Eben Ngula wanted to be involved in food production ever since his first year of tertiary education at the University of Namibia (Unam), where he studied agriculture.
After attaining a Bachelor in Agriculture degree at Unam, he moved to Aussenkehr in southern Namibia, where he was the production manager for Namibia Grape Company for years.
His responsibilities were to grow and export world-class, quality grapes. It was there that he learned about food safety, packaging and logistics. That inspired him to turn his vision into reality and start his own business.
Before starting his business venture, he made sure to do research about the product and the industry.
“I wanted to venture into flour production years ago. I then started to look into all the requirements to do so, from starting a company to what goes into production such as raw materials,” he says.
The reason why he started African Grain Millers was because he knew Namibia has a very harsh environmental reality with its dry arid conditions. That led to the idea of contributing towards something that is consumed by more than 50% of the country, which is mahangu.
African Grain Millers currently has eight employees. Ngula humbly says he has not accomplished anything yet.
In the next five years Ngula hopes to see African Grain Millers becoming one of the biggest milling companies in the country, with an extremely talented team.
“One of the challenges I faced was trying to penetrate the market, especially when retail owners were hesitant to meet with us due to Covid-19, let alone shelf our products, so we had to improvise and change our communication and pitch a strategy with our marketing team to a more virtual approach,” he says.
The reason why he left his previous job was because he noticed that he contributed tremendously towards his previous employer’s success while working there, so he told himself that if he put the same effort into his own venture, he could go even further and have a greater impact on society on his terms.
“My advice to young aspiring entrepreneurs is that having ideas without starting is worthless. It’s the execution that brings home the gold; the most important step is launching your business. Once your business is launched, you can figure everything out afterwards because of the current uncertain times we are facing,” he says.
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