KTDA moves to beat cheating clerks

Business

By Robert Nyasato

For years, Josephine Moraa, a small-scale tea farmer in Kisii has been a victim of falsification of green leaf weight by collection clerks at the buying centre.

At the buying centre, the collection clerks employed by her factory, which is managed by Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA), call the shots.

"The clerk’s word is final. Even if the leaf I deliver weighs 20kg and the clerk says it weighs 15kg, that is what is recorded," laments Moraa, who has been in the tea growing business for over 20 years.

At the end of the day, the clerk would sell the extra weight of leaf robbed from farmers to bogus tea growers who are registered with KTDA as genuine, but have no tea farms on the ground.

In fact, there is a common joke in the area that some unscrupulous farmers have tea farms at the buying centre and earn more than the genuine growers.

Moraa says that if a farmer insisted on being given full payment for their crop, the clerk would threaten not to buy her leaf again. And in most cases, the clerks have had their way.

And in doing this, the clerks have so many loopholes to exploit. Key among these has been the manipulation manual weighing scales to defraud farmers. So rampant has been the practise that a number of growers either abandoned tea farming or resorted to hawking their crop to brokers acting for multinational tea companies.

But thanks to KTDA, this is set to change. The tea marketer has come up with a new technology that is likely to eradicate the menace and cushion the farmers from exploitative clerks.

KTDA ICT Group General Manager Mwende Gatabaki says they have introduced an Electronic Weighing Scale Solution (EWSS), a new digitalized technology to replace the manual scales. "With this innovation, falsification of green leaf weight at the buying centres would be a thing of the past," Gatabaki says.

"The machine records the weight on delivery and issues an electronic receipt instantly. The clerks neither read and record the weight nor issue a receipt."

Electronic access

The new technology also links 57 of KTDA’s tea processing factories to the head office in Nairobi, thereby enabling farmers to electronically access information about payments due to them each month.

And that is not all there is to the technology. It now takes under three days up from six months to register a new grower, thanks to a more-efficient recording system of the number of growers.

The new technology – the first of its kind in the agriculture sector – saw KTDA post Sh40 million in savings previously spent on communication and Sh64 million in labour and energy costs.

Thanks to the innovation, KTDA is now going places. It recently scored an African first by bagging the CIO 100-2009 ICT global award since the award was initiated 22 years ago by the US-based CIO Magazine.

Business value

According to CIO Editor-in-Chief Ms Maryfran Johnson, 100 companies that are creating new business value by innovating with technology are annually honoured worldwide.

They also must demonstrate excellence and achievement in IT to make it to the list.

Others awarded included Kaiser Parmanente (US) in the healthcare ICT category and

Jetblue Airways (US) for using ICT as the rock of business transformation.

Eliminating cheats

The electronic capturing system was piloted for one year up to September in selected factories before it was rolled out to the rest.

Gatabaki said the system has helped to eliminate "ghost growers" who were paid without providing tea.

Region six ICT coordinator Enock Ogara says it costs about Sh4.5 million to install the new system in one factory. The EWSS is wireless and employs the Bluetooth technology and has an accuracy of 0.1.

The system comprises three devices including a mobile-phone size computer known as Portable Device Assistant (DPA), an electronic scale and small printer.

Once a farmer puts his leaf on the electronic scale, it records the weight after stabilising, and then automatically reflects it on the PDA. All the clerk does is to press ‘accept’ button for the printer to produce a receipt. The receipt bears cumulative weight of the farmer’s monthly deliveries.

The transaction is then transmitted to the factory central computer system and the same is replicated at KTDA headquarters to facilitate payments to the farmer. Previously, one had to carry the information manually to Nairobi.

The PDA has all data about the farmers who are only required to produce the registration number, which when fed into the system, produces details of the farmers and the payments due to them.

Each factory needs 10 EWSS machines with two acting as back-ups. The devices use rechargeable batteries with lasting about 12 hours.

Under standard conditions, each factory should have eight leaf collection lorries. Each would be assigned a clerk with one SWSS on a particular route. This move is departure from the past where each buying was allocated a clerk.

"The new technology will render some clerks redundant while the farmer will realise good returns on the crop as costs on communication, and labour are scaled down substantially," Gatabaki says.

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