It’s a Tuesday morning after a rainy night, and the wet season has finally started here in the capital district of Kenya. We are on our way to KENDAT, The Kenya Network for Dissemination of Agricultural Technologies. KENDAT is active in three domains: conservation agriculture, agro-enterprise support, and donkey husbandry.
Since they are based in an eastern Nairobi residential area, we had trouble finding their office – rush hour held us back. Luckily, once in the residential area, the only obstacles remaining are the many water-filled potholes and an occasional barrier, which invariably opens up upon explications of our driver.
Today’s AGCommons team consists of Jennifer Barnes, Jubal Harpster and me. Jennifer has two weeks of West-African campaigning for AGCommons under her belt, and we are about to find out that it shows. Both Jubal and I have been involved in its preparations and are ready to jump in.
We were scheduled to meet Dr. Pascal Kaumbutho, CEO, and mrs. Anne Murangiri, Informations and Communications Officer, but Pascal fought the same city traffic. Anne talks us through KENDAT’s work on the role of the donkey in rural life; a truly compelling story of the gentle-animal-tractor-of-the-poor, though not the first thing that we came for, … or so we thought. Anyways, highly effective use of everybody’s time, and when Pascal enters we’re set to enjoy Jennifer’s run-down of AGCommons philosophy.
It goes down well with the KENDAT staff, and Pascal easily bridges to his overview of their activities. This is what we came for! We hear more about the crucial role of the donkey, for instance, as the only available ‘lorry’ in many places in the wet season, when some roads that have red or black soil surface become impassable to real vehicles. Just like crop production, road accessibility has its seasons too.
KENDAT’s efforts on conservation agriculture leave a solid impression. The work is targeting three districts: Kimuru, Lari and Mwea. Their focus is on building community awareness about improved cropping practices and helping farmers to understand the techniques and tools that come with it. We find that the principles are minimal soil disturbance, permanent surface cover, and crop rotation. We probe with Anne and Pascal for farmer responsiveness, and specifically ask whether they have appropriate communication mechanisms to engage with them. We are pleasantly surprised to hear that discussions are ongoing with the telecom industry to set up village information centers to address such issues.
On our questions to relevance of location-specific information for farmers, we get two replies: “No, we are not doing it” and “Yes, this appears to have great potential for us, though we do not quite understand the what-and-how of it.” It appears, there is potential work to be done for us here.
Much later in the day, having incurred serious delay with the highly valued KENDAT visit and two more, we found ourselves traveling to Jujua, 40 km out of Nairobi, near Thika. This would be our last appointment for the day: KIOF, the Kenya Institute of Organic Farming. In a sense, KIOF and KENDAT are somewhat similar, in that they advocate sustainable agriculture with local communities. KIOF targets students exiting high school, and attempts to train them in the ins and outs of organic farming. Their school in Jujua is augmented with four demonstration farms, where students can get all the necessary hands-on in the field. The knife cuts at two sides: they generate some off-farm income for KIOF and get to learn the profession.
KIOF is internationally networked. They were funded by a Dutch non-profit organization, but are now trying to be self-funded. They have links to similar institutes in other African nations and beyond. And with their modest means they achieve to stay on top with latest developments in their field, as well as with development in ICT. It was great to observe that one of the staff members runs the KIOF website, and has his regular blogs in there as well.
KIOF also worked with other organizations to help their farmers and students achieve certification for their organic farms, thereby helping farmers to have value-added products that they can sell or export for premium.
The twilight return trip to downtown Nairobi took us along a large Marabou roost, up in a patch of yellow-bark acacia trees, reminding us that bedtime was coming for us also.
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