As winter sets in the country most farmers across rural Nepal will have long harvested their crop. But high in the hills of Kakani VDC in Nuwakot district just 70 km northwest of Kathmandu, winter is a season of plenty, although it wasn’t always like this. A little more than a decade ago, the people here, most of them farmers with small landholdings had difficulty making ends meet. By this time of the year their annual harvest of maize, wheat and radish would have been long over, forcing them to migrate elsewhere looking for work or seek loans from the wealthy at high interest rates, until one fruit, the strawberry changed their lives.

First introduced in the district almost two decades ago by JICA-Nepal, the farmers in Kakani had bought the plants at Rs 10 per sprout from neighboring villages but being completely unaware of cultivation techniques or skills they were unable to get the maximum benefits until 1998 when Micro Enterprise Development Programme (MEDEP) under the financial and technical support of UNDP came to the district. Realizing the potential that the fruit had in uplifting the lives of the locals MEDEP provided various trainings that included entrepreneurship development, technical skills, linkage with micro finance institutes for micro credit access, market network and promotion schemes such as packing, branding, etc to 200 farmers from the area.

Today there are 312 plus households in the VDC currently cultivating the strawberries. Of these 126 of them decided to get together to form the Nava Bihani Farmers Multipurpose Cooperative whose Nepali name means "new morning". "We didn’t know the proper techniques to get the most out of the strawberry farming even though we had been doing it for some years. Now we produce and sell almost 250000 Kgs a year," says Kanchaman Tamang, the chairperson of the Cooperative and the District Micro Entrepreneurs Group Association.

When the plants begin bearing fruit the farmers collect anywhere between 150 Kg per day in the initial phase to 3000 Kg per day towards the end of the five month period that starts in late November. The strawberries are graded according to their size in four different categories; A,B,C, and D with A the largest being sold for up to Rs 350 per Kg to five star hotels in Kathmandu and even as far off as Calcutta.

The cooperative helps members to grow and market their produces charging three percent per Kg that goes into their fund. With the collected money the group has been able to invest Rs 315000 in building a center for collection and storage for their produces. The remaining amount was provided by MEDEP through the District Micro Entrepreneurs Group. Nava Bihani is the first MEDEP sponsored group to receive an approved loan of Rs 1 million from the Nepal Rastra Bank as a part of the Rural Self Reliance Fund. Rs 250000 has already been disbursed to the group as part of the first phase of the loan that came interest free for the first six month. The amount will be used by the cooperative to give loans to its needy members to extend their enterprises as many of them are now planning to start asparagus, mushroom and rose cultivation.

The income from the strawberry farming has been a blessing for farmers like 29 year old Chinimaya Lama who had a desire to study but couldn’t do so because of poverty. “It wasn’t just us; the entire village was suffering terribly and desperately needed a way out," she recalls. Today Chinimaya is a successful strawberry entrepreneur and supports the education of three of her siblings. Her elder brother went to work abroad from the earnings he made from the same while a younger sibling is already an entrepreneur cultivating roses. Chinimaya also holds an official post in the Cooperative and is planning to expand her business to include mushrooms while others in the village are now experimenting with roses and asparagus. There is even talk of producing strawberry wine in the near future. "Thanks to MEDEP and the strawberries villagers now have tin roofs in their houses instead of straw ones, proper toilets, TV, money to educate their children and access to modern health services. My family alone saves at least Rs 35000 a year from this business," says Lama who hopes that someday all the villagers will be educated.

Kakani will soon be in competition though. Kanchaman has already learnt that the 9000 plants that farmers in Dolakha district took were showing good signs. He is nevertheless happy and says, "It will be good for Nepal if we can export our strawberries abroad. It will help many other poor people like us rise out of poverty. The government must invest in training us and upgrading technology."