EADD II - East Africa Dairy Development Phase II

BUILDING COMMUNITY, INCOME IN KENYA

NYIGON, Kenya—On a cold, early morning in this small community, women and girls are already working on farms. Bent over and holding short hoes, they tease the hard, unyielding earth, submitting it into production. Not far from the farms, cattle graze in fenced pasture, precariously built from scraps of wood and thin lines of barbed wire to keep the wild animals out. From a distance, the landscape of the Kenyan countryside is beautiful, but up close it reveals the realities of small farmers trying to make a life by navigating the delicate balance of the productive earth. “If you don’t have a cow, you plant,” said Augustine Cheruiyot, then country program manager for Heifer International’s East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) project. “If you don’t have land, you work for others,” he continued.

Within this community, most of the people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Those who own land they inherited from their ancestors are considered lucky. Those who own livestock are considered luckier. Together, farmers have come together to form a group that has a shared vision of participating in the booming dairy industry that is developing around the milk chilling plant which Heifer International installed in the community as part of EADD, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2008.

They started small by collecting their milk in a small makeshift shed in a field several years ago. Then, as they increased their ability to aggregate larger volumes of milk, they obtained a loan to build a cooling tank with the capacity to hold more than 1,300 gallons of milk. Almost 900 farmers now supply milk to this facility, where all the suppliers are also shareholders.

Behind the small chilling facility, a financial service association—or village bank—is under construction. In many ways it resembles a retail bank anywhere in the world. There are two counters for the tellers, an office for the manager and a vault in the back for the money. Jasper, a young man in a dark suit becoming of a banker, runs the operations. Under his shrewd but gentle leadership, the community is navigating the creation of a business in the same manner as one would broker the launch of an Initial Public Offering in a sophisticated multimillion-dollar corporation on Wall Street.

“Shareholders buy shares on a check-off system,” Jasper explained. They pay a small amount with each milk delivery. He said that within the first two to three months, no shares are deducted from the revenue of farmers, but as the site begins to turn a profit, farmers begin to receive dividends on their investments as well as better prices for their milk.

The benefits of membership extend well beyond shareholding. Members have their milk transported to the chilling plant for free, while non-members have to pay. Members also get cheaper access to healthcare within the health insurance network that has sprung up along with the myriad of services and other businesses that are developing around the chilling plant.

It is clear that Jasper is smart enough be in any investment firm in London or New York. Yet, unlike most young people in Kenya, he has chosen to stay in his community. “I want to work for the community,” Jasper said. “This is the community that educated me. I get satisfaction from serving the farmers. I am a member of the community. I am also a farmer.”

The chilling plant in Nyigon is only one of several that have been installed in the area since the project began. EADD heralds a return in rural community development that far exceeded the expectations of the project’s design. Farm families that once produced milk at a subsistence level—just enough for home consumption—are now able to not only produce surplus but also become involved in larger formal economies. This is a manifestation of what Heifer International envisions for the families it assists.

MORE MILK, BETTER PRICES

It was only 11 a.m., but 18-year-old James was bone tired. He woke up at 5 a.m. to milk his cow, then set out to collect more milk from his neighbors. An hour later he was pushing the bike, its seatand baskets piled with 24 gallons of milk over the rutted dirt roads leading to the chilling plant of the Kiboga West Livestock Cooperative.

The 18-mile trek over hills and through the grassy pastures of the rural Kiboga region in central Uganda takes five hours, and James does it every single day.

A cement building housing a gleaming, pot-bellied cooler the size of a hippopotamus, the chilling plant was the most popular spot in Kyankwanzi village when James wheeled up. A pack of children, barefoot and dusty, laughed and chased each other in the street out front. A dozen men, each hoisting their own jerry cans and repurposed motor oil bottles full of milk, waited their turn in line. Like James, these farmers are members of the cooperative and bring their milk every day so it can be chilled and sold in bulk to a processor who will pasteurize and package it for sale. The Kiboga chilling plant is part of the East Africa Dairy Development project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and organized by a conglomeration of nonprofits including Heifer International. The goal of these cooperatives is to help farmers boost production and find a ready market for their milk.

Members were already taking advantage of an artificial insemination program aimed at improving milk production. Ankole [an-KOHL-ee], the longhorned local breed, is renowned for delicious meat, but it produces only about half as much milk as a Holstein. Farmers here are trying to marry the Ankole’s immunities to local diseases and fitness to the Ugandan environment to the productivity of western breeds.