She saved sh3,000 daily to build her house

By Owen Wagabaza

No one believed in her, not even her husband. “A nurse to build a house in Kampala, You are day dreaming”, they told her, but the more people despised her idea, the more determined she became.

Hope Ssemakula, a nurse at Kawempe Family Clinic had long wanted to build a house, but finances had hindered her dreams. “I earn a very small salary and it is hard to build using it,” says Ssemakula, 39, a mother of four and married to Dr. Grace Ssemakula.

Realising that her salary was little, Ssemakula developed a saving culture to have her dream come true. “I bought a wooden box in which I would throw sh3000 daily. Saving almost sh90,000 a month,

“By the end of the year, I had saved over sh1m,” Ssemakula says. In 1999, using her savings of sh1m, she started a poultry project with 200 birds, but with a vow to grow the business.

“By then a chick was at sh800 each, I bought the 200 birds at sh160,000 and I used the balance to stock feeds” she says.

Ssemakula ventured into poultry to supplement her income.

Starting out

In 2000, Ssemakula embarked on her dream project of building a house. Fortunately, her husband had purchased the land years back, and it was being underutilised.

“I had told him before that I will put a structure on it, but he never believed me” Ssemakula says. It is the same land, near her marital home in Kawempe that she used.

Aware of her limited resources, Ssemakula started by laying bricks for a full year. “I contracted brick layers to lay for me bricks enough to build a complete house. Because of the finances, I would stop them and recall them back after saving some money to take us a little longer.”

She says the brick layer laid each brick at a cost of sh50 each and she was paying him weekly. “I was paying him according to the number he had laid in that particular week, and this helped me a lot as it was more convenient than waiting when they are in large numbers and you end up paying millions,” she says.

By December 2000, they had made over 46,000 bricks. In consultation with her builders, they assured her the available bricks were enough to complete her house.

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SMART WOMAN: She started poultry keeping to increase her income

Foundation

For the first three month, Ssemakula started saving for construction to begin, but this time, she was depositing the money at a hardware shop in Kawempe.

“All the money I was spending on brick laying started going into buying building materials, by March 2001, I had deposited almost sh1m,” she says.

In April 2001, construction work started. She remembers a time when her husband found masons digging the foundation and told her she had started something she would not finish. “Even after successfully laying over 46,000 bricks, he still didn’t believe in me. He thought I would abandon the project,” she says.

Unknown to her husband, the bricks had made life easier. “My biggest expenditure was on the builders, whom I was paying sh21,000 per day, but luckily, I was also paying them weekly, and within no time, the first phase was finished,” says Ssemakula.

She had to halt the project for a little while to save money for roofing. To pull it off, Ssemakula says she started depositing her savings at Roofings until the money was enough to buy iron sheets that can complete a whole house. By June 2002, roofing the house was complete.

Finishing

By the time the roofing process was complete, her poultry had stopped laying eggs yet it was her major source of funding.

With only finishing remaining, Ssemakula took a loan of sh5m from Centenary bank and this she used to do the finishing on her house. She was sure that the loan would be repaid from the money she got from tenants.

In 2003, the house was ready for use. The house has eight self-contained double rooms and occupied fully.

Constructs another house

After successfully constructing the first one, Ssemakula built another house just adjacent to the first one. “There was an old man who was selling this plot cheaply and I decided to buy and construct another smaller house,” Ssemakula says.

“I bought it at sh2m and it is the savings from my first house that I used to build this self-contained two bedroom house,” she says. Ssemakula now has a stable income from her two houses.

She says building a house is not easy but with careful planning, and determination, you can build slowly, but surely. Ssemakula is glad God kept her poultry productive all through the time she was constructing.

Since then, Ssemakula has remained a poultry farmer and is currently rearing 300 layer chickens.