Venture that could be Bungoma’s cash cow

Pauline Muchai is keen to see that residents of Bungoma County embrace dairy farming to boost their livelihood. (Photo:Nduta Kamau)

At the mention of dairy farming 47-year-old Pauline Muchai’s face effortlessly illuminates. The dairy farming crusader in Bungoma County hopes to bridge the 80% deficit of milk which is imported from neighboring Counties. This is a sure case of passion leading you to one’s destiny. Pauline, a teacher by profession is a trained Dairy technologist and Accredited service provider with Kenya Dairy Board (KDB) in Western province.

Pauline is a Lead farmer with a microfinance. Opportunity Kenya Limited (OKL) in Bungoma County. Every week she meets three different Dairy farmer groups to train them in all aspects of dairy farming from value addition, financial education, budgeting and risk management and investment.

“We have 25 dairy farmer groups in Bungoma and I have trained among them, Cooperative Societies, Kitinda dairy, Smallholder dairies and ICRAF groups,” she says.

As chairperson of Dairy Value chain Platform and Dairy Traders Association Western, Pauline has a tough task to convince farmers that there is money in dairy farming as compared to keeping zebu cows.

However, every good cause is occasionally met by challenges. Pauline was a onetime dairy farmer with 45 cows but she and her brother were affected by the post- election violence in 2007 that made them sell off all their cattle. For the love of dairy farming, she embarked into milk trade.

“I run a milk bar where I get chilled milk from Trans Nzoia at 45 shillings per litre. But we would want to buy milk from our dairy farmers in Bungoma since most of our milk we import it from other Counties,” says Pauline.

Pauline was sharing her experience during a joint workshop with MicroSave and Catholic based organization CORDAID. The workshop brought in 55 microfinance and agricultural experts drawn from Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Netherlands to share experiences on how to increase financial access to small holder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa.

As residents strive to embrace dairy farming, they face the challenge of collaterals to access Micro Finance Institutions and as with most farmers, they have phobia of loans. This perception is changing with the intervention of the Bungoma County government seeking to empower its residents. Governor Ken Lusaka has embarked on a dairy project by buying 450 dairy cows that will be distributed in 45 wards as a grant.

Two dairy farmer groups have been identified in the 45 wards and each will receive 10 dairy cows, this project will run for the next 4 years bringing in a total of 2,250 dairy cows distributed in Bungoma County.

The County government is also reviving Kitinda dairy which has a milk processing plant.

Also, Sh400 million has been disbursed to 42,000 rural smallscale farmers through a pilot- microfinance project funded by the European Union microfinance program. The pilot project that is coming to an end in December 2014 was conducted through 7 microfinance Institutions to develop lending products to smallholder farmers.

Even as UN declared 2014 as the International year of family farming systems, the smallholder farming is going to be key agenda in the post 2015 Sustainable Development Goals.