Meet the Pharmacist, turned advocate and champion for the advancement of the honey sector in Ethiopia. Born and raised in Addis Ababa until the age of 15, Seble Makonnen earned her Pharmacy degree in 2002 from Butler University (Indiana, USA) and practiced as a pharmacist for more than a decade in the US, before returning to Ethiopia with her family in 2011.
Seble was always greatly influenced by her visionary father; he was a farmer, the son of a farmer who believed in hard work which he instilled in her at a very young age. This included the importance of an education and the reward one earns from building an impactful and thriving enterprise as he had done for the past 30 years, with the development of an enterprise currently continuing to serve a large number of smallholder farming communities across Ethiopia. Seble’s daily interaction with individuals from very different backgrounds, cultures and languages was influenced by her mother who always valued and embraced these differences with the strong social fabric and importance of supporting each other in personal and professional journeys.
The decision to move back to Ethiopia came from the advice of her father who had asked her to join the family business which was engaged in the distribution of agricultural technologies and Conservation Agriculture. This work led her husband to many corners of Ethiopia, which gave him the opportunity to bring back small collections of rural products such as honey, coffee, oats and regional artifacts. By early 2016, Seble had obtained a large variety of unique honey from taste, texture, color, flavor and smell. The sudden realization of the immeasurable abundance and diversity of Ethiopia’s natural resource and Ethiopia’s centuries old beekeeping tradition and history is what gave birth to Lal -The Honey Company.
Honey became the gateway through which Seble soon began to explore and unravel the great enormity of the natural resources Ethiopia is blessed with especially in the area of beekeeping and honey production. The journey through different parts of Ethiopia to engage with beekeepers allowed her to learn about the different honey varieties, their use and value and inspired her to promote not just the honey but also the communities producing them. Seble explored the enormous possibilities with a greater sense of responsibility which evolved into her life passion. Today, through Lal, Seble wants to catapult the status of Ethiopian honey to the world stage. Ethiopian honey varieties also contain medicinal properties which her background as a pharmacist enables her to exploit identifying honey varieties with high medicinal properties to order to market products as medicinal honey products.
Seble concludes “I am committed to telling our collective Ethiopian honey history, to share with the world the centuries old traditional beekeeping that has sustained the largest bee in Africa one honey variety, one community at a time”