Rita Jha, a mother of 4 is from Thera Kachuri VDC of Dhanusha District. Before the intervention of Micro-interprise Development Programme (MEDEP), she used to belong to a low income family having no any income source accept her SLC passed husband Mr. Lalan's salary who had a job as a school teacher. But his salary alone was not sufficient to meet the family's requirements. She was desperately looking for some income opportunity so that she can support to her husband to meet the family's needs.

Before starting this incense stick making enterprise, her per capita income was Rs. 4,250. Since she belonged to low income family, MEDEP Dhanusha has identified her as the potential participant for entrepreneurship training. She undertook the full package of entrepreneurship training organized by MEDEP in Dhanusha and taken incense stick making enterprise as her choice for source of earning. After she completed the training, she decided to start the incense stick making enterprise but she had problem of raw materials and money for buying the raw materials. Most of the raw materials required for incense stick had to be imported from Bihar, India. With the facilitation of MEDEP Dhanusha, Agriculture Development Bank provided her a credit of Rs. 5000 to start up her enterprise. With that amount she bought raw materials from India and started the enterprise. By then her husband had also decided to join her business since he had to face many problem in his earlier teaching job and his last contracting job due to Maoist rebel.

Then husband and wife Lalan and Rita Jha started incense stick making enterprise as their main source of livelihoods. However, their new enterprise also could not contribute significantly to meet their two ends meal and other basic family requirements due to high cost of raw materials and very minimal profit margin. They were in dilemma on whether to continue or to leave the enterprise. However, Lalan couple decided to take risk and continue the enterprise taking all the possible steps to cut down the production cost and maximize the profit.

MEDEP staff working in Dhanusha were trying to trace out the origin of raw materials and they asked Lalan to explore if raw materials are available in Nepal. One day when Lalan was in Gaya, India in connection of purchasing raw materials, he, cleverly, tried to explore out where those raw materials come from. He got some clues from one of the dealers of the raw materials in Gaya Bihar that some of these raw materials are the non-timber forest products of Nepal and some other can also be locally prepared such as char coal powder, bamboo sticks, Rato Dhulo etc. He also got strong clue that the Jiket powder which is on of the major raw material required for this enterprise is the grinded powder of bark of the fodder tree collected from the community forest of Nepal. He identified the tree as Kaulo ( ?) which is grown plenty in farmers private land as fodder tree as well as in community and national forest in low and mid-hills of Nepal.

After returning from Gaya, India, Lalan contacted to Community Forestry User's Groups in Sindhuli and Udayapur districts, identified Kaulo trees and made an arrangement with groups to buy the bark on regular basis. They grinded the bark using their local grinder to form powder. Similarly, Lalan couple prepared charcoal powder by themselves and buy bamboo sticks from local entrepreneurs (Bangdawar Village ) where many people of the village are doing bamboo stick enterprises. Thus, they have been able to get most of the raw materials required for their incense stick enterprise from Nepal itself in quite reasonable price than purchasing from India. MEDEP provided them grinding machine for grinding Kaulo bark and making powder as to help entrepreneurs to improve their traditional technologies and or providing appropriate technology for enhancing the efficiency of the micro-enterprises.

The new initiative taken by them has significantly contributed to substitute the import of raw materials and reduce the cost of production and maximizing the profit from their products. Now they are happily running their enterprise and doing encouraging business with good profit margin. For instance, earlier when they had to purchase raw materials from India, they could make only 10 percent value addition but now when they use raw materials of Nepal, value addition to the product is up to 90 percent which is definitely contributing not only to maximizing the profit for them but also saving Nepalese rupees from import substitution of raw materials as well as employment generation to rural poor.

At present they are not only full time employees in the enterprise but they have also given employment to other 110 local women in the enterprise. According to Lalan couple, they earn Rs. 30 to 40 thousands a month out of which their monthly net income is Rs. 10 to 12 thousands from the sale of the incense stick. Now they do not have market problem for their product which they use to face earlier. Earlier there used to be monopoly of few big business men to buy their products and the profit margin they use to get was minimal. But this situation is no longer exists. Now some quantity of the finished product ? incense stick and some other raw materials are being exported to India by them. According to them they want to increase export of their product but due to procedural and legal complications for export they have not been able to do so. Another big challenge such micro-enterprise are facing is to compete with big business men in term of quality, quantity, product design and market promotion. In this regards, micro entrepreneurs are demanding separate export and import policy for micro-enterprises.

According to them, the major problem they are facing at present is packaging of the product. Their experience is that printing of packaging materials in Nepal is expensive. Though it is cheaper in India, they only do in large quantity i.e. they do not accept order less than 100 thousands pieces and take full payment (IRs. 40,000) at the time of placing the order. Their version is that micro-entrepreneurs can not afford to invest that big amount at a time. I sensed that they are strongly expecting some short of support from MEDEP or Friends of Dhanush to address the problem of standardizing packaging for incense sticks produced by micro-enterprises in Nepal.