• By Victor Wasike & Aurillia Manjella
• Posted 05/17/2016

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Unity Hotel in Busia serves food for the healthy

It all started over lunch at the Unity Hotel in Busia County, where I ordered my fish, brown ugali (a typical Kenyan starchy staple) and cowpea leaves. The hotel, located on the roadside of the Kenya-Uganda highway, was packed. As I tasted my order, I realized why people fight for a space to sit here over the lunch hour. The vegetables and ugali were delicious. I couldn’t help but lick my fingers.
I had to meet Alice Oruko, the owner of this establishment, to find out the secret behind the restaurant’s popularity. According to Alice all it boils down to is serving “well prepared local food at an affordable price”. The owner also acknowledges that increasing awareness of the benefits of local foods to human health is a major contributor to her success. “Eat local vegetables, stay young and healthy and live long” Alice likes to tell her customers.
Alice is a 45-year-old widow and a mother of four. She started the Unity Hotel in 2002 building a small wooden structure where she would prepare and sell local food and generate enough income to take care of her children. Setting up a business with limited capital is impossible for many, but Alice had the extra drive: she was the family’s sole breadwinner. In the beginning, Alice would purchase cooking supplies from a local shop on credit, using the money earned at the Hotel to pay off her loan at the end of the day or week. As the hotel increased in popularity and Alice’s income improved, the wooden shack evolved into a tin-roofed eatery. Since March 2015, the Unity Hotel, now built with mortar and stone, stands proudly and Alice continues to serve freshly-prepared indigenous foods to her growing clientele. The breakfast menu features local foods such as finger millet, sweet potatoes and arrow roots. Lunch time is busiest, serving dishes like brown ugali and a traditional mixture of maize and beans known as githeri, local vegetables such as jute mallow (murenda), cowpea leaves (kunde), spider plant (saga), African nightshade (suga) and slender leaf (mito) as well as fish and local chicken. Cowpea leaves are cooked with groundnuts and milk making them all the more nutritious. Every Monday and Thursday is Luhya Day with the menu celebrating Luhya cuisine and food culture.
The hotel’s popularity – the Unity Hotel feeds at least 300 government officials working in Busia County – got me thinking about the possibility of linking entrepreneurial farmers affiliated with the Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition (BFN) project to successful local restaurants and hotels. Farmers and restaurant owners would respectively benefit from the reliability in market demand and supply, while customers would gain from the increased availability of indigenous crops and the consequent improvement in dietary diversity. Currently, Alice receives her vegetables from a single supplier, a local farmer who delivers the vegetables ready-prepared. As Alice’s is a reliable customer and her payments are always on time, the supplier is willing to carry out the post-harvesting at no extra cost, adding value to the vegetables by removing the petioles. Alice is also reluctant to change suppliers as he delivers the vegetables on time, in the right quantity, quality and form at a reasonable price. The cassava, arrowroot, sorghum and millet she uses in her dishes are bought from the local market.
The BFN project, thanks to additional support from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), is working in the County exploring opportunities to link African Leafy Vegetable (ALV) producers to hotels and restaurants like Alice’s to spur the sustainable production and consumption of these indigenous crops. If successful, the increased demand for ALVs would provide a market for these species that are currently neglected and risk extinction. At the same time, it would benefit farmers who would find ready market for their produce and provide consumers the choice of nutritious leafy greens to incorporate into their diets for improved nutrition. Until recently, consumers preferred processed foods over local vegetables and fruits that were considered as “food for the poor”. Thanks to people like Alice, traditional foods are slowly making a comeback in Busia as “food for the healthy”.