BY BUSINESS DAILY
With a combination of welding and artistic skills, David Gachanja has found a way to not only make money out of scrap metals, but also gain satisfaction in realising his dream.
As a boy, Gachanja nostalgically narrates how he used to model toy vehicles out of tins with his childhood friends and drag them around for fun.
In primary school, during art and craft classes, he would hone his skills further, this time curving wild animals and human beings from wood.
Now, the 47-year-old makes a living from artistic works, selling metal sculptures along the Nyeri-Nanyuki highway to passers-by and motorists along the busy road.
His works include wild animals like impalas, buffalos, ostriches, gazelles, elephants as well as human forms.
He is proud of his work though he says metal sculpting was arrived at while working as a casual labourer at a construction site in Nakuru. Gachanja says he stumbled on invoices and receipts of sculptures that the hotel they were constructing had ordered for use in landscaping.
“I perused some of the invoices and payment receipts that the hotel was paying an artist and felt challenged, as they were paying up to Sh80,000 for a single statue,” he said.
In 2011, he decided to put his skills to good use.
He travelled back to Naromoru, his ancestral home, and set up a welding workshop. Gachanja started off by making windows and metal doors to supplement sculpting.
“I chose Naromoru because of its vicinity to Mt Kenya and its frequent visitation by tourists as most game reserves and attraction sites are situated here,” he says.
He projects to supply his artwork to Ol Pajeta conservancy, Sweet Waters and Sangare Ranch among several popular tourist destinations in the area.
“I add value to pieces of metal instead of selling them to scrap metal dealers then make sculptures of various animals used for landscaping or beauty displays in houses,” he says. This way, he earns more than selling scrap to traders at Sh10 per kilogramme.
He can make an elephant sculpture out of eight scrap metal pieces which retails at about Sh5,000 compared to the Sh80 which he would have earned selling the metals as waste.
His first piece was an impala’s head that he made from assembling waste metal from his welding works which fetched him good money and came as a motivation to his venture.
On average, he sells his products at between Sh3,000 and Sh50,000 depending on their size and complexity.
The highest bid Gachanja has received to date was Sh120,000 for a horse sculpture which a hotelier wanted to place at the front of his business premises.
Gachanja makes about eight sculptures per day. He laments of lack of a good market for his products which impedes the growth of his business.
“I want to reach out to the global market by improving my marketing techniques, including taking my works to exhibitions in different parts of the country,” say Gachanja.
He urges the county government to provide pudding entrepreneurs working space and training.
“Young people need to realise that there is a lot of money in the jua kali sector. They shouldn’t wait for office jobs because they may never come,” he says.