Making a tidy sum from milk

Enelerai women dairy cooperative society members at their milk cooling plant in Narok West.The women used to risk their lives in charcoal trade but milk business transformed their lives. (PHOTO: ROBERT KIPLAGAT/ STANDARD)

Enelerai Women Dairy Cooperative Society started in the year 2009 as a community based organisation with 46 litres of milk but today buys 3,000 litres daily.

Enelerai in the local Maasai dialect means Acacia tree and the group chose the name as it resonates well with their lives which like the acacia which withers in the scorching sun, they also endured a grueling journey from charcoal trade to the now booming milk business.

According to their Director Richard Lang’at, the only man in the women-owned group, milk trade and small-scale dairy farming has turned lives around in the community.

Before the women ventured into dairy farming, their lives were difficult as a result of the charcoal trade most were involved in. They would wake up at ungodly hours, leave home while their children are asleep then trek for many kilometres away from home in search of charcoal to sell.

It was often a torturous journey that saw some of them killed, some gave birth by the roadside, some lost their children and not forgetting the negative environmental effects posed by charcoal burning.

These challenges caused ripple effects in the lives of these Narok West residents, which forced them to think of an alternative occupation.

“As women, we’d had enough of the suffering we were forced to endure in order to feed our families. We convened a meeting as three women and begun to map out a way to change our lives,” the group’s founder and chairperson, Esther Tuiya, says.

She says they came up with the idea of buying milk then selling because none of them had a cow. They started by contributing Sh50 then later increased the amount to Sh500 then Sh1,000 before later registering the cooperative society.

“Poverty had hit us hard. None of us imagined that women could do something and get their own money but today, I go to the bank and do not fear taking Sh1 million loan for our society unlike before when keeping even just Sh1,000 was hard,” she says.

Due to increase in milk supply to the dairy cooperative, Lang’at says they aspire to acquire another milk cooler to enable them expand their business hoping that by then the community will have ventured into commercial dairy farming.