When Emmanuel Katongole, 54, completed his 20-year IT consultancy job at the Ministry of Finance in 2023, the Zoology and Botany graduate embarked on research into any project that could give him a return on investment with minimal supervision.
First, he thought of venturing into goat rearing but soon found out that the business was feasible with at least 200 goats for a start-up. However, he chose to keep a few of them for emotional support because it feels good looking at them.
His idea was of a project which can be supervised most cost-effectively without a lot of travel and investing time.
This was a departure from his initial 2015 idea of building a 29-bedroom hotel in Kisaasi trading centre, which he started but stopped at the foundation level.
As he continued to research, he stumbled upon the idea of fish rearing, specifically catfish, because Tilapia required a lot of water management, which would bother him, while the Nile perch, on the other hand, had not yet been domesticated for rearing at home.
He settled for Catfish because of their carnivorous nature-they eat anything which is almost rotting.
When he scanned his environment in Kisaasi, Katongole found out that there were a lot of intestines of chicken and fish which were being thrown away.
During the onset of the 2020 lockdown, there were idle youths who approached him and requested him to allow them to roof the hotel structure and sleep there while providing security, something he willingly accepted because the place had become bushy.
Later, when he asked the youths whether they could collect intestines for him to feed the fish, they accepted, which to him was more or less free labour he had locked into his project.
He also learnt that unlike Tilapia and Nile Perch, which are top feeders, Catfish are bottom feeders.
Katongole decided to seal off the partitions on the would-be first floor to prevent the water from seeping, and introduced 11,000 fish fingerlings into the project in March this year.
Through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Gemini, Katongole researched the behaviour of fish feeding; he discovered that in Southeast Asia, fish feed is very cheap.
The fingerlings need startup feed to depend on for their foundation, which is imported from the Netherlands, but afterwards, they can feed on anything.
He then bought a meat mincer at Shs1m, which can mince up to one ton of intestines or meat in one hour.
He mixes the minced intestines with cassava flour to bind them and lets the mixture dry up under the sun. It is the same machine which turns the mixture into pellets.
To him, the feeding aspect for the fish was done because he was getting the feeds more or less free of charge, and now he is off the commercial feeds.
Asked why he abandoned the hotel business, he said he was motivated by the 24-year-old boy in Busega, a city suburb, who calls himself Mr Big Fish, who buys a kilo of fresh Catfish at Shs7,000 and sells a kilogram of smoked fish at Shs40,000 for export to Europe.
He observes that at Busega, which is now the Kampala Fish auction market, trading starts at 3 am and by 7 am business is done.
Katongole hopes that by September, when the fish mature, he will be able to harvest between 8,000 and 10,000 and sell at Shs7,000 per kilogram.
He boasts that unlike other animals like cows and goats where farmers are price takers, he does not need to drive his fish to the market.
The buyers will have to drive to his farm and take them at his price, and if they are not interested in his price, he will continue feeding them and even attract higher prices.
He intends to install a water recycling system and establish vertical beds for growing vegetables, which will also become part of his farm produce.