WEST KENYA AGRIBUSINESS

For more information:

John Otini Regional Programme Manager

Gold Rock Park Mombasa Road next to Tuffsteel complex P.O Box 13892-00800 Nairobi, Kenya Office: +254 (20) 206 30 15 / 17 / 18 Mobile: + 254 722 696 336 Email: john.otini@icsafrica.org Skype: ics.john.otini

Marije Tanis Social Business Developer

Smallepad 32 3811 MG Amersfoort The Netherlands Office: + 31 33 303 0250 Mobile: + 316 14 53 55 20 E-mail: marije.tanis@ics.nl Skype: marije.tanis

Check our website for all our activities: www.ics.nl

WEST-KENYA AGRIBUSINESS
ICS (Investing in Children and their Societies) strives towards a better future for children in rural Africa and Asia. Through its projects and programs, it builds on a sustainable growth in welfare and wellbeing by simultaneously investing in economic and social opportunities and needs. The central building blocks of the work of ICS are social business, child protection and skillful parenting. Agribusiness project The ISEC (Investing in Social and Economic Change) program in Western Kenya aims at improving income and food security for households. The agribusiness project is designed to provide farm inputs (such as hybrid seed, fertilizer, improved bush beans and traditional vegetables) to farmers on credit for the purposes of ensuring timely planting, adherence to modern farming technologies and to increase the harvest. ICS procures the inputs from different suppliers and allocates them to project officers, who will in their turn distribute the inputs via community facilitators to individual farmers. Farmers are required to have paid a commitment fee of 500 Kenya shillings before they can receive the inputs. Repayments are recouped back every week. Partnership with Ministry of Agriculture The ISEC program was able to seek partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture for the implementation of the program. Working together with the ministry is often challenged with bureaucracy within the government. However, partnership is important as the government has the decision right on many subjects in the area and access to governmental knowledge institutes. Planned measures were taken to engage the ministry right from the start within all facets of the project. The ministry was in charge of input quality control, training of community resource persons and farmer to farmer learning through field days. Partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture in capacity building of community resource persons yielded interesting results. Ordinary farmers in the community became technical experts, teaching fellow villagers complex farming technologies in an unsophisticated language that was immediately received and adopted by other farmers. As Kennedy Ngao, one of the community facilitators put it, it is very fulfilling when you walk around in the village and your neighbours and other community members respectfully call you teacher. Partnership with Equity Bank The social business approach adopted by the ISEC program required that farmers who have access to input credit invest their energies in commercializing their farms. To encourage an entrepreneurial approach to farming, ICS partnered with Equity Bank to build capacity of farmers to be able to develop simple business plans for their farms. Additionally, farmers were trained on basic financial management skills to enable them to determine the profitability of the various farm enterprises they carry out. Through the financial management training, farmers were able to make savings. Additionally, the response towards the input package provided on credit was positive as farmers started making prompt repayments to ICS.

Nafics Ltd. Part of the agribusiness project is Nafics Ltd. Nafics is a Kenyan maize trading company that is currently being incorporated in Kenya. Nafics wants to be a profitable business, improving the livelihood of smallholder farmers by filling in the imperfections in the Western Kenyan maize supply-chain, specifically in Busia and Kakamega. Based on a strong network with medium-sized millers, smallholder farmers, brokers and other players in the public and private Kenyan maize market, Nafics will: buy maize during harvest seasons when volumes are high and prices are low, store and treat the maize, sell the maize outside the harvest season when prices are high. Nafics will offer farmers market access through buying their maize, market transparency by announcing the market price - this will improve their bargaining power, reasonable market prices, an increase in the production of maize per acre by cooperating with ICS on production improvement, and on the longer term, a market also for other crops produced by the farmers Through this cooperation, sustainable socioeconomic change for the farmers results in food and income security on the one hand and a profitable business on the other.