By Herbert Musoke
Abel Kiddu and his wife Eunice Atuhire Kiddu grow mushrooms at their farm called African Mushroom Growers located at Luvuuma zone, Makindye municipality in Kampala district.
Kiddu says that he has never seen any business that makes easy money like mushroom growing.
“For example, in just a month, you will have started harvesting and selling your mushrooms. It requires little capital to start and even the uneducated can grow mushrooms,” he says.
The market for mushrooms, Kiddu says, was boosted during the COVID-19 pandemic as health personnel advised people to eat healthy foods and the crop was highly recommended.
“The market increased locally in schools, hotels, restaurants and supermarkets. However, to get this market you must have quality, consistency and commitment because once you start supplying your customers will want to have mushrooms all the time,” he explains.
Kiddu says growing mushrooms creates a number of jobs including selling cottonseed hulls, making gardens, making spawn, growing and value addition, among others.
As the farm expanded, Atuhire explains that they continued learning more, especially on how to preserve the crop and make various products from it to fetch high revenues.

“Learning from countries that are already doing well with mushroom growing, we are now making wines, jelly and beverages from the crop. Additionally, after winning the Best Farmer competition in 2018 and my husband travelled to the Netherlands, he saw a machine making sausages. We are, therefore, in the final stages of installing this machine and starting to make mushroom sausages,” she says.
How they started
Kiddu was introduced to the idea by Joyce Wasswa, who was growing mushrooms on a small scale.
He learnt from her that the enterprise did not require a lot of capital, but was profitable.
In 2010, he started growing mushrooms with a capital of sh200,000. With this, Kiddu bought three sacks of cotton seed at sh25,000 each, spawn at sh60,000, firewood for boiling the gardens and liquid bleach to sanitise the room for growing the mushrooms.
“From these, I made 120 gardens. Each garden has a lifespan of three months and can yield at least 1.5kg. Each kilo goes for sh5,000. I earned sh7,500 from each garden, totalling sh900,000 from the 120 gardens,” he says.
When he started the business, he was still courting Atuhire who had a job as an accountant.
He says she was very supportive of the business, especially financially and with advice.
In 2020, the business became self-sustaining and could pay its employees well and that’s when Atuhire quit her job and embraced self-employment.
The couple has continued investing in the business and today, the farm sits on a quarter of an acre.
The farm’s facilities include a growing house, a garden incubation house, a cotton seed store, a garden preparation centre, a value addition centre, a mushroom seed (spawn) preparation centre and offices.