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.