Our History

It All Began With a Setback
Our journey began in 1995, when the founder, Mr. Robert Matsiko, was retrenched from his job at the Ministry of Agriculture after five years of service. He walked away with a modest severance package of just Shs. 140,000 — not much to build a future on, but enough to plant a seed.
Working briefly as a poultry assistant, Robert noticed a gap that farmers around him faced daily: affordable animal feed was hard to come by. Rather than see this as someone else’s problem, he saw an opportunity to serve his community.
He partnered with a colleague and fabricator, Francis Nuwarimpa, who built a small milling machine. Together, in a modest rented space, they began producing animal feeds and named the venture “NUMA” — drawn from the first two letters of their surnames. It was a partnership born of shared skill and shared risk.

Standing Alone, Then Rebuilding Together
Two years in, Mr. Nuwarimpa stepped away to focus on his fabrication business, leaving Robert to carry the venture forward alone. Rather than scale back, Robert leaned into the growing demand, hiring two employees to help manage operations — the first sign that this was becoming more than a one-man effort.

With limited capital, he set up a small wooden structure in Kabwohe to serve as both office and factory. In 1997, he and his wife, Mrs. Mercy Matsiko, formally registered the business as Numa Feeds Limited, laying the groundwork for future support and growth.
Then, just as momentum was building, disaster struck. In 2000, a fire tore through the structure and destroyed everything.
It would have been reasonable to stop there. Instead, Robert turned to his wife’s savings from the small secretarial bureau she ran. With her support, Numa rose again — this time as a semi-permanent structure reinforced with iron sheets, and with an expanded focus that now included brooding chicks for farmers. It was resilience built on partnership, not just individual determination.

An Idea Sparked, 
A chance moment — eating sandy millet bread (karo) at a restaurant in Kampala — sparked Robert’s next idea: Uganda’s consumers deserved higher-quality millet flour. He returned to Mr. Nuwarimpa to fabricate a dedicated milling machine, and to guarantee quality, he brought in women with traditional expertise to hand-sort the millet before milling — a small but telling example of how Numa grew by drawing on the skills already present in its community.
Packaging was its own challenge. With few resources, Robert sourced paper from Kampala, designed labels using pre-inked screens, and glued them onto packets by hand. Every step was improvised, but the reputation for quality held — and grew.

Learning, Financing, and Scaling Up
A connection to Enterprise Uganda, facilitated through UNDP, gave Robert formal entrepreneurship training that sharpened his business instincts and gave the company a clearer sense of direction. That relationship opened a further door to the Microfinance Support Center, whose financing helped Numa move into a fully permanent factory.
From there, the company kept investing in itself — upgrading from rudimentary tools to modern, state-of-the-art machinery to keep pace with growing demand and to protect the consistency its customers had come to trust.

From Business to Social Enterprise
As Numa grew, so did its sense of responsibility. The company became increasingly aware of malnutrition affecting communities — especially children and mothers — and responded by developing nutritious soya composite products aimed squarely at this problem. It was the moment Numa stopped being just a business and became a social enterprise: one whose success was measured not only in output, but in impact.
That impact has shown up in household incomes and food security, through employment opportunities created especially for youth and women, paired with deliberate skills training and mentorship.

A Company Built With Its Community
Today, Numa Feeds works alongside 300 farmer groups, delivering training in agronomy, post-harvest handling, value addition, group dynamics, and leadership. Through partnerships with other stakeholders, the company also helps supply farming inputs — fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, drying stalls, tarpaulins, and bicycles — strengthening productivity and income at the household level.
What started with Shs. 140,000 and a small milling machine has grown into a story of resilience carried forward not by one person alone, but by a community that rebuilt, learned, and grew together.