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.
