End of Year Post

I recently celebrated the two year anniversary of my stay in Kenya. It is hard to believe that I have been living abroad for so long. What began as an 8 month consulting assignment has evolved into a fantastic 26 month experience. Juhudi Kilimo has grown from a small pilot project into a real business. We have a new website and we were featured in several news articles. Our partnership with Kiva in 2010 has been quite productive by helping us distribute over $550,000 worth of loans. Thanks to all of you who have provided our clients with loans through the Kiva site. Next year will be exciting as we finally hope to close on our funding and will roll out new projects such as M-Pesa and the SMS survey tool called mSwali.

Some personal highlights of the last few months include my rafting trip on the Nile to Jinja in Uganda, a trek through the jungles of Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas and a few other stories I wanted to share.

In Uganda we rode the big white water on the Nile before a new dam destroys the whole valley.

I enjoyed some bungee jumping into the river as well.

In November I joined a group of friends on a trip to Rwanda to tour the genocide museum of Kigali and see the mountain gorillas. We were charged several times by the gorillas who were drunk on bamboo shoots. One person in our group was actually slapped by a young male.

Diani Beach Generosity

I was biking in Diani beach with a friend and some 20km south of our hotel when we rolled into a thorn patch along the beach. Dozens of razor sharp thorns quickly cut clear to the wheel-well of our tires. We slowly walked our bikes back to the main road and into the nearest town. The afternoon was approaching and I was getting worried that we would not make it back to our hotel before dark. After asking around the village, we found a group of kids who directed us to a bicycle repair shack. There we found an old man with some super glue and a few strips of rubber. The initial diagnosis uncovered nearly 30 puncture holes and resulted in a bill of 500 shillings (about $6).

Unfortunately, I had spent our last 200 shillings on a few bottles of water and did not have a single cent to my name. We begged for help but the old man would not consider doing the work pro-bono. The group of children who had followed us from the beach all banded together, dug deep into their pockets and scraped together the money we needed for the repairs. I will never understand why these children spent their month’s savings to help two strangers from the US fix their flat tires. In many parts of Kenya a gang of children would easily steal our bikes and leave us stranded in the streets or worse. Kenya continues to surprise me.

M-Pesa in the Farms

In August of this year, Juhudi Kilimo held a training event and a new office launch in the town of Eldoret which is in the western part of Kenya. We invited 150 farmer group officials who represented about 3,000 farmers to participate in a free training session on agriculture and animal husbandry. The training is our way of expanding our lending operations into a new area. During the registration, one of my regional managers noticed a large crowd of farmers who were gathered in the lobby of the seven-story hotel where our training was being held. The manager discovered that these farmers from the rural parts of the country had never been inside of an elevator before. They were terrified of the small box that seemed to swallow people and disappear with them. We finally convinced everyone to make the journey to the 7^th floor (many opted for the stairs) where we began our training.

At the end of the event, I was telling the crowd about Juhudi Kilimo’s plan to roll out M-Pesa, the mobile money payment system with Safaricom, and asked how many of them were familiar with the new mobile technology which is not even available in the US. All the farmers raised their hands. Safaricom did an amazing job in identifying an appropriate technology for the rural Kenyan farmer and then in distributing it to the most remote regions of the country. It gave me lots of hope for our plans to integrate M-Pesa with our loan administration system.

I am looking forward to a great 2011 with Juhudi Kilimo in Kenya.

2010 Kenya Maralal Camel Derby

August 2010 marked the 20^th annual Maralal Camel Derby in Northern Kenya. I was fortunate enough to participate alongside 40 friends from Nairobi and Western Kenya. The derby races were comprised of a 10k camel race, a tri-camel-thon (run, bike, camel) and the team tri-camel-thon.

My small invite to seven people quickly grew to 40 and later required a small caravan of four cars and a 25 passenger bus from Nairobi to haul our group seven hours north to the small town of Maralal. Little did we know what awaited us as we all boarded our vehicles at 11am in the morning from Westgate in Nairobi. Five hours into the drive, the tarmac ended and we bounded along rough dirt roads deep into the bush. The sun went down and we had not seen a sign of life for several hours. The bus passengers started to get uneasy. Northern Kenya is not a place you want to drive around at night due to the high probability of bandit attacks. I reassured everyone that we were still headed in the direction of Maralal and did my best to keep moral high. Around 8pm we halted in front of a sizable river with water reaching well above the wheel well of the bus. The group emptied out of the bus into the desolate night to lighten the load for the crossing. Fortunately, the bus powered through the river only to reach another treacherous stretch of deep mud which had already swallowed a small truck earlier. We somehow managed to find a better road and reached Maralal a little after 11pm under the escort of some local police who kept any bandits at bay.

The morning of the derby was just as chaotic as the night before. The derby ran out of camels for our group and needed to include several non-racing local camels. The camel selection process was critical to the success of the race. I was lucky to be placed with a scrawny white camel named Daha who looked like he would buckle under my weight. Each rider was also assigned a “handler” who was a young boy who ran behind the camel beating it with a stick.

About 30 racers in all lined up on the starting gates to begin the first 10k camel race of the day. With my vuvuzela strapped to my back, I raced forward and began an hour-long struggle of excruciating pain and battle to stay balanced on the camel. There is no skill involved in camel racing but just to hold on tightly and try to not let the saddle-pounding shake you apart. We raced through the streets and down the open plains of Maralal avoiding thorny bushes and trees while all along being spurred on by the little handlers with thier sticks. My crazy camel sprinted down hills out of control and I managed to get near the front of the pack. Nearly passing out from the pain and exhaustion I glimpsed the finish line but my camel decided to take a rest break almost 100m from the end. I blasted my vuvuzela but Daha just reared around to bite me. We quickly sorted out our differences and crossed the finish line to place 5^th in the race.

The afternoon races which featured the challenging tri-camel-thon which includes a 2.5K run, 5K bike and a final 5K camel. I had too many lacerations on my ankles from the camel stirrups but still entered the team event and selected the bike section. Our team placed 3^rd overall and brought in some nice prize money.

The journey back to Nairobi was not nearly as eventful but exhaustion took over and everyone slept most of the way home.

I look forward to training for 2011.

July Update

Summer in America is hard to beat. This is a picture of Doha but I recently spent time in DC and New York at conferences raising money for our company. We had some successful meetings but I feel like it may still be many months before we see any serious investment. Regrettably, I had to sacrifice my trip to the World Cup to make my trip to America, so I hope the trip was fruitful. For the first time, I experienced some culture shock when I landed in DC and met up with some friends for burgers and beer. The streets were quiet and organized and people were able to walk around at night. The bars, stores and malls all provide more things to buy than the mind can process at once. I felt like a foreigner in another country and one of my friends gently reminded me that I was.

After the work portion of my trip ended in the East Coast, I made my way back to Colorado to visit my family and complete my annual fishing trip with my twin brother. The upper Colorado River remains one of the most pristine and spectacular stretches of land I have ever seen in all my travels around the world. My brother and I spent three glorious days stalking big trout in our drift boat along the banks of the mighty Colorado River.

During our last two nights we did not see a single person on the water or at any of the moonlit campsites. We managed to bring in a considerable load of hefty fish even under the constraints of the early season water conditions. I just hope this part of the world always stays like this and remains far away from disasters like the oil spill in the Gulf.

Two days after returning to Kenya, I joined some friends on a trip to the Lewa Conservancy to participate in a fundraiser half-marathon. This being my first ever half-marathon, I was quite intimidated by the 800 other runners. Keep in mind that this part of Kenya is home to 40% of the world champion marathon runners. Many believe the Lewa marathon to be among the most difficult races in the world due to the high altitude and course topography. The runners also need to share the trail with lions, leopards, elephants, buffalo and several other wild animals known to kill people. We were fortunate not to see anything dangerous but it was quite exhilarating running alongside antelope and zebras under the shadow of Mt. Kenya in the distance. My pre-training was pathetic. I finished in a little over two hours, but I managed to pass about 600 people along the way.

Now it is back to the grind of long days and sleepless nights in efforts to bring more resources to the rural smallholder farmers of Kenya. We are pilot testing the M-Pesa mobile money transfer system on our clients next month which I hope will bring convenience to our farmers and lower our own costs.

1 Year Anniversary

Juhudi Kilimo celebrated its one-year anniversary in April last month. We have come a long way but still have much further to go. Kenya is full of microfinance companies and and all of them would like to reach the rural poor smalholder farmer with products similar to ours. Juhudi is well positioned to be the first in the rural areas of Kenya but we still need to expand to secure our foothold.

The microfinance sector seems to be focused on Sub-Saharan Africa as Nairobi recently hosted the Africa Middle East Microcredit Summit. This Summit was attended by celebrities such as the Queen of Spain, the Princess of the Netherlands, President Kibaki of Kenya and Nobel Lauriat Muhammad Yunus. The sector is expanding exponentially since my first visit to a little non-profit called SKS in India. SKS is about to float an IPO and raise $250 million. Juhudi hopes to be the next success story in improving the livelihoods of the rural communities of Africa. We recently moved out of the pilot phase on Kiva and hope to reach our new monthly fundraising limit in May

For the first time since my arrival in Nairobi, I finally managed to pay a round of golf. Many of the Microcredit Summit attendees were stranded in Kenya due to the volcano and I entertained one of them at one of the golf courses in Nairobi.

I used up the last of my airline miles to make a nice trip to Egypt and the fantastic city of Cairo. The lifestyle and people of Cairo drew me in immediately. I could easily live there.

I made some good friends, rode fast camels and managed to get invited to an Egyptian wedding.

I spent many hours playing dominos over a cup of Egyptian tea or a water pipe and talking international trade in broken Arabic trade with old men who could not believe I had come to them from Kenya. The Egyptians were great at hassling foreigners and charging exorbitant prices for things like a camel ride. I threw them for a loop when I started paying them with Kenyan shillings, which they had no idea of value but accepted enthusiastically.

I do not have many more travels planned but there just may be a trip to DC in June or perhaps a journey to South Africa for the World Cup at some point this summer.

Wundanyi - The Switzerland of Kenya

Near the southwest town of Voi sits a little oasis tucked in the Taita hills called Wundanyi. I like to call it the “Switzerland of Kenya” because of the breathtaking mountain views and lush rolling hills. Juhudi Kilimo has a small field office in this town that I was able to visit recently.

I think Wundanyi is one of the few towns in Kenya where anyone can walk around the streets late at night and not worry about safety.

"Staff Olympics" after a long days work

We hope to expand in this region of Kenya and were conducting an outreach and training program with the help of SwissContact, our partner organization. I might buy some land and expand there myself someday.

In the office most of my days are spent with normal CFO responsibilities such as updating our financial plans and budgets or answering the seemingly endless questions from potential investors (I actually like that part). The other half of the day is take up by my general manager duties such as developing a strategy for rolling out the mobile phone money transfer system with Safaricom or identifying new assets to finance such as solar lights and bio gas plants. My side projects include designing a metrics-based compensation plan and organizing a training curriculum for our 36 employees.

In the midst of all this activity, I started to realize how incredibly global my day to day activities have become. We are a tiny Kenyan company but seem to operate with dozens of countries from around the world. In one day I met with a group of Italian rating analysts in the morning then chatted with a Brazilian agriculture expert and later had a conference call with a Colombian investor in India followed by another call with a French micro-insurance agent in Tajikistan. Now through Kiva.org we have hundreds of lenders from several more countries contributing directly to our client loans. At night, I went home and fell asleep listening to a free live broadcast of NPR from Denver on my cell phone just to remind me of the "simple" life back home.

A New Year

Christmas came early for Juhudi Kilimo. I purchased a tree for the office and suddenly the money started to roll in. Before the close of 2009, we were able to secure around $1.04 million in funding from fantastic organizations such as OikoCredit, MESPT, K-Rep Bank and Kiva.org.

The entire Juhudi family is especially excited to be one of the newest Kenyan partners with Kiva. If you have never visited the Kiva website, I suggest you do and register with our group “Friends of Juhudi Kilimo”. In the next few months you will be able to provide loans directly to our clients through the Kiva website.

Anyone in the world can now lend as little as $25 to our clients in rural Kenya. Our staff will be taking pictures and uploading stories about our clients so you can choose whom you would like to support. Since you are providing a loan and not a donation, you will get your $25 back to lend again or cash out. I will do my best to make sure your loan is paid back by our clients.

We also launched our new website: http://www.juhudikilimo.com/.

I spent five glorious days skiing with my family in the freezing temperature of Colorado. Since I have been in Kenyon I find it much harder to adjust to the cold.

Now I am looking forward to another great year in Kenya and enjoying its perfect weather.

December in Kenya

This post is long overdue. I give lots of credit to all those people who are better about updating their blogs regularly!

My Kenyan Thanksgiving consisted of a fresh 5lb red snapper from the coast and a fantastic sunburn. Still a much better deal than battling the cold and the snow of Colorado.

My last six months were spent fundraising and building our new company, Juhudi Kilimo. The first investor to jump into this relationship with us could be well rewarded. The only problem is… nobody wants to be the first to jump.

Juhudi Kilimo means “effort” and “agriculture” in Swahili and the company provides micro-asset financing for productive assets such as dairy cows, chickens and irrigation equipment to thousands of rural smallholder farmers all across Kenya.

Dairy cow in Murang'a

Water tank financed for irrigation during the droughts

A serious chicken farmer

Client training at Juhudi Kilimo

A Kenyan goat- fantastic for eating

"Asset" transport in the rural areas

We are also continuing to spend time with the East African Dairy Development Program in our Rural Enterprise Financing program to provide financing to a series of milk chilling plants throughout Kenya. The chilling plants bulk and cool the milk from rural dairy farmers and create a consistent outlet to sell milk for many of our smallholder farmers who have purchased cows with our loans. The plant also prevents the evening milk from spoiling before it can be processed by the larger processing plants. Currently, we are financing two plants in Western Kenya near towns called Kabiyet and Lelan. The Kabiyet plant started collecting milk in August this year and is now gathering 23,000 liters of milk per day from the surrounding dairy farmers.

The $140,000 plant is already profitable and looking to pull in close to $145,000 in profits this year. The farmers in the area are excited because they are now paid 25 Kenyan Shillings (about 33 cents) a liter instead of the 18 (24 cents) from local hawkers. If the average farmer sells 14 liters per day, that creates another 100 shillings ($1.30) in income each day. It might not sound like much but an extra $1 a day in the rural areas of Kenya can go a very long way.

The Kabiyet and Lelan plants are community owned with a local board, so all of the profits remain in the village and are distributed throughout the 3,000 shareholders from the community. The whole story makes me want to quit my job, buy a few cows and start a dairy farm.

I am committed to staying with Juhudi Kilimo for as long as they are able to remain operating to help drive the management and source financing. We are so close to making something spectacular with Juhudi Kilimo and we have already come a long way.