GLOBAL LEAF HOLDINGS (U) LIMITED or GLH was incorporated in the year 2015 as a tobacco growing, sponsoring and exporting company but due to the many bureaucratic hitches, it started actual operations in the year 2017 and already has over 4000 small scale farmers and a growing number of commercial large scale farmers registered as contracted farmers in Western, Middle North and the West Nile regions of Uganda, all with the capacity to grow and supply GLH with quality tobaccos of Dark Fire Cured(DFC), Flue Cured Virginia (FCV) and Burley(Air Cured) all with quality flavor and semi flavor styles that complement the tobaccos from other GLH supply chain especially from the Eastern parts of DRC.
Three years into its existence, GLH, a member of ASETU ( Association of sponsors and exporters of tobacco in Uganda), is known in the Ugandan tobacco industry as the company to watch, as it has the goodwill of the tobacco farmers, the national and regional authorities and also the goodwill of other industry stakeholders at large.
From a modest tobacco production capacity of 1,000,000 kilograms, GLH plans to grow its capacity exponentially and double this capacity each year as it expands its logistical infrastructure alongside.
Operating from its regional offices in Hoima and Arua, GLH is strategically positioned to tap into the DFC growing areas of Kibaale, Mubende, Kamwenge, the BURLEY areas of Hoima and the extensive FCV areas of the West Nile and Middle North regions as well as expanding the FCV growing into the Eastern parts of DRC.
From the time of its conception, the medium term objectives of GLH were to hand strip, butt, thresh, re-dry, package and export processed tobaccos from its own Green Leaf threshing plant (GLT) and thereby adding value to its chain of products.
Already, GLH has acquired a 15 acre piece of land built with huge ultra-modern warehouses in western Uganda that it now plans to put up a modern re-drying & threshing plant where a lot of progress has been made towards the acquisition of the necessary machinery.
In the long term, GLH plans to put up a primary factory to manufacture, package and sell cigarettes in and outside Uganda.
GLH espouses as its core values INTEGRITY, QUALITY, SUSTAINABILITY and RELIABILTY.
And it is on this basis that we have made it our routine of holding frequent and regular training, seminars and workshops to inculcate the above values into our staffs.
As a responsible corporate citizen, GLH has inbuilt into its crop calendar the issuing of free maize seeds to our farmers at the end of the tobacco season to ensure adequate food sustainability and a healthy workforce.
Alongside this, GLH issues an average of 80 tree seedlings per farmer to its growers every season as well as planting an average of 5 acre woodlot of hybrid eucalyptus seedlings annually in each of the districts we operate in a bid to protect the environment. During the 2017/2018 crop season, our company planted a 5 acre eucalyptus woodlot in Butema sub-county in Hoima district.
Going forward, we have factored in issuing our farmers with gal sheets and bags of cement on loan basis to ensure decent living conditions. This will be recovered at agreed period of time depending on the recovery trends exhibited by our farmers.
All these have been made possible through the vision, hard-work and tenaciousness of Mr. Kamau Benson, a Kenyan by birth but a Ugandan by naturalization who joined Mastermind Tobacco (U) Ltd in 1995 straight from Egerton University before later joining Continental Tobacco (U) Ltd and has been in the tobacco business since then. Apart from working in Uganda, Mr. Kamau has also worked in Eastern DRC as the General Manager of Congo Tobacco Trading (CTT) before relocating back to Uganda and incorporating Global Leaf Holdings.
Joined by Mr. John Gitonga Kihoro, an entrepreneur and financier based in Nairobi, Kenya with business interests and influence in Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Burundi, gives GLH the potential to expand its tobacco interests further afield by using the already laid out extensive network of this partnership.
As regards the human resource available to GLH, apart from Mr. Kamau’s vast experience in the tobacco sub-sector of not only Uganda but also DRC coupled with Mr. Gitonga’s experience and business acumen, GLH also has in its extension a team of trained and experienced field staffs in tobacco growing spanning for over 35 years who train and nurture our growers with the much needed Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) to produce and market quality and highly treasured tobaccos.
It’s this experience that GLH intends to leverage on in building an un-matched tobacco giant in the region that is second to none.