Enterprise Development:

Heifer Project International (HPI) in Kenya has been supporting farmers in selected regions to engage in livestock enterprises. These enterprises have had family nutrition, income and natural resource management as their main objectives. Farmers in the Coast have been supported in entering into dairy production systems. The farmers in Western province have received support in dairy cow and dairy goat production systems and those in Nyanza have concentrated on dairy goat enterprise in addition to their traditional dairy cow production systems. Among these major enterprises, HPI has supported young farmers with oxen and ploughs for tilling the land and a few with donkeys and carts to carry out the business of transportation in the rural areas.
In the arid and semi-arid areas, HPI has supported pastoralists with camels, goats and establishment of sustainable supply of veterinary drugs and technical support in form of training and delivery of animal health services. Another area of support has been on honey production. Farmers are given beehives on loan and training on bee and natural resource management. The honey harvested is semi-processed before releasing to markets.

In the high potential regions of Rift Valley and Central provinces, HPI has supported farmers in developing sustainable milk marketing enterprises through establishment of milk chilling centers as part of value chain systems. These centers are also farmer service centers and they form the core of the farmer-based value chain systems. These centers collect farmers’ milk, chill the milk and sell to processors who buy it on contract. 

The value chain concept has been applied in the pastoral areas as well. The value chain includes marketing of camel products, mainly milk and meat which have been semi-processed in Ngurunit location of Samburu district. The Narok district herders are helped to develop livestock marketing systems through a livestock holding ground at Suswa where livestock offered for sale can be held to rest and some fatten to meet market demands.
The second phase of this livestock marketing value chain will be establishment of a modern slaughter house where the Maasai herders will process the meat to meet local and international standards, thus facilitating the herders to enter into global market.

Heifer Kenya support to enterprises (milk cooling plants)

Heifer Kenya continued supporting the farmers owned  milk marketing enterprises with training and market linkages with an aim of turning them in to farmers self governing institutions and operating their own enterprises profitably. The cooling plant board of directors and management staff were trained in the operations of the dairy plants, leadership skills, milk quality assurance, market linkages, record keeping and financial management. A total of 7,436 farmers marketed 10,517,884 liters of milk through the 4 cooling plants and earned net income of Kenya shillings 153,228,091 (US$ 2,321637)

 The table below shows the details of the performance of each of the milk cooling plants 

The farmers made use of the income they earned as follows:

• Supporting the education needs of their children
• Being able to afford household needs of food and medical care
• Improving their homesteads
• Re-investment in the dairy sector by purchasing better producing animals