Engineer gets Ugandans walking on egg shells

Sengonzi Godfrey creates niche with egg-spiced concrete floor tiles

Kampala, Uganda | PATRICIA AKANKWATSA | With Chinese tiles, Italian tiles, Turkish tile, Egyptian tiles and recently Ugandan tiles flooding the market, what chances would a budding entrepreneur have of finding success with a local tile?

For Godfrey Sengonzi, the answer lay in creating a totally different tile. The imported tiles from China, Italy, and Egypt and other places are fired clay ceramic or porcelain and marble or granite.

Sengonzi created a niche with cement tile. And he added a twist by including eggshells in his base compound. The combination has proved a winner because cement tiles are heavier than other tiles and would be quite expensive to import. Although cement tiles are generally renowned   for their strength and durability, the eggshells Sengozi adds in the mixture improve these two qualities.

“The eggshells make the tiles durable because they contain calcium carbonate that can give or produce calcium hydroxide which increases the rigidity and stiffness of the composite, making it suitable flooring material,” says the 31 year old graduate of Science and construction Management from Makerere University Kampala.

He is the brain behind Sengonzi Terrazzo Manufacturers and Construction Company Limited located in Kiteezi an outskirt of Kampala city. His company makes tiles and charcoal from egg shells.

Sengonzi says he came up with this idea during his final year at university in 2014 and currently makes around 1800 tiles a month, which he sells for between Shs20,000 and Shs30, 000 per square metre, depending on size. That is not bad money even after deducting costs of production.

And Sengonzi has plans to expand.

He has been selling to people from around Kiteezi and the surrounding areas. But he has lately started getting customers from far and wide through his Facebook page. He makes tiles in four different sizes; the 30 ×30 which goes for Shs20,000 per square meter, the 40× 25 at Shs22,000, the 40 × 40 at Shs25,000 and the largest; the 60 × 30 at Shs30,000 per square meter.

Sengonzi says his business has not grown to the level he wants. He wants to buy more machines.

“Right now I have managed to buy only the crusher but work would be easier if I could buy another machine that molds tiles. It is really hard work molding and time consuming,” he says.

And the costs of production are high. The boards on which they mold are quite expensive with each costing roughly Shs110, 000 depending on the size, he says.

He says that he has few boards too mainly because they are expensive yet the number of boards determines the number of tiles to be made.

“Each tile takes between 15 to 24 hours to dry,” he says.

Creating jobs

“I hope when this business grows, I will provide employment for people. So far I am employing people who collect egg shells, the ones that crush them and those to help with the molding. And now that I have a crushing machine, work is going to be swift, so I would need more people to do the molding”, he says.

“And my tiles are affordable. People will be able to buy affordable and durable tiles”, he adds.

 How he started.

“I remember we had a course unit called construction material. That is when we studied about terrazzo. And that is when I thought about doing something on my own that would create job opportunities. That is the idea of making terrazzo or tiles using polythene bags came to my mind”, he narrates.

He says he started by using polythene bags and egg shells crushing them using a common mortar and pestle at home. His whole idea of using the polythene bags was to give the tiles different colors. But later dropped the polythene bags out of the process because they were making the work hard. And concentrated on egg shells and white cement.

“When I completed my course, I didn’t go job hunting. I wanted to concentrate on putting into practice what I had learnt in school. It was not easy though because I needed capital. Material I had but like you know, every business needs funding”, he says.

Even though, he did not have capital, he never gave up on his dream. He worked with the little he had until he met Etienne Salborn, a German who was starting the Social Innovation Academy (SINA) to empowers poor youth to create own jobs and social enterprises through innovative ideas.

Sengonzi made tiles Salborn used for flooring the SINA academy and when funder from Germany visited, they loved them and pledged to help. But the money never came.

Sengonzi’s project took off when Mildmay Uganda; the HIV/AIDS hospital on Entebbe Road contracted him to apply epoxy on the floor for Shs.15million. Epoxy floor coatings are plastic like and are commonly used for commercial and industrial flooring.

Initially, Sengonzi would pick egg shells from chapatti stalls. But he now gets them from hatcheries of poultry farms and crushes them to a fine powder using machines. After, he mixes the crushed egg-shell powder with white cement and other chemicals to form a moldable paste. He shapes the tiles on squares board. Crushing a tonne of egg-shells costs him Shs. 100,000 but he has recently bought his own machine. He now hopes to get Ugandans to literally start walking on eggshells with his floors.

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