On a wet chilly Wednesday morning in Mweiga, a small town in Nyeri, Kenya, Paul emphatically tries to maintain control of his pickup truck as it skids through the slippery dirt road, occasionally splashing through puddles of muddy water. It is November, the middle of the short rain season and Paul is on his second trip collecting milk from smallholder dairy farmers.
November 27, 2020
Digitizing milk procurement in Kenya
Milk Procurement in remote areas
Paul instinctively steers his pickup truck with glee as he approaches a group of about ten women standing next to the road holding milk cans on one hand and a piece of cardboard on the other, on it we came to know has a journal card neatly hidden. Kamau* one of the two assistants riding with Paul* jumps out of the truck just as it comes to a stop next to the women and quickly hangs a clanky bulky analogue weighing scale on a hook at the back. The women rush to have their milk weighed in what seems like a scramble. Kamau weighs the milk and hands over the can to John, the other assistant who is already on top of the truck’s railing, waiting to pour milk into one of the big metallic milk cans. While at it he shouts the weight of the milk so that the farmer clearly gets it.
By now Paul is standing next to them. He takes out a journal book and starts writing the milk weights and does the same on the farmer’s milk card for the month. He doubles up as the driver and the field milk recording clerk. It takes them less than three minutes to finish taking weights from the batch of ten women and as quickly as they started, the trio dash along to make twenty more similar stops carrying out the same routine like clockwork. When the milk cans get full, they speed off to offload at the milk aggregation and chilling plant owned by Mweiga Co-operative an affiliate of Kieni Dairy Products Ltd. Here a receiving clerk weighs the milk and carefully records the route collection in a manual journal.
Every month Mweiga co-operative dispatches two teams of milk transporters to make such trips to collect between 5,000 and 8,000 liters of milk from about 850 active farmers. For Paul and his team, their daily interaction with farmers is a fulfilling mission however they are weighed down by the tedious administrative work involved in capturing their field data on paper and later into farmer files on digital journals. Paul says:
We enjoy our work very much, but we have a difficult time keeping track of our daily milk records. Sometimes when it rains, writing in the journal book is impossible.
Smallholder dairy farmers form 90% of the milk producers in Kenya. Majority of them live in rural areas where infrastructure is poor with limited connection to the grid. As a result, dairy cooperatives who serve these farmers face many inefficiencies in their bid to procure milk from every farmer including high cost of operations and lack of transparency due to use of manual records.
In November 2020, Safaricom and 2SCALE signed a partnership agreement that will see onboarding of the entire milk procurement and payment settlement processes for Kieni Dairy Products Ltd (KDPL) and its seven affiliate co-operative societies into DigiFarm’s Dairy Management Solution. This solution aims to use mobile technology to decrease the cost and risk of transacting with smallholder farmers and support informed decision making using real-time data from the field.
Kieni Dairy Products Ltd
Kieni Dairy Products Ltd (KDPL) was formed in 1995 as an umbrella organization by seven dairy co-operative societies. The co-operative societies were keen to revolutionize the dairy sector in Nyeri County by boosting their ability to access a better market for their milk and pursue value addition for additional revenue. KPDL facilitates production and marketing of milk produced primarily by smallholder farmers (SHFs). The company now has more than 5,000 active dairy farmers and markets an average of 500,000 liters of milk every month. Mr. Isaac Mwaniki, CEO-KDPL says:
Our co-operative societies lack tools and systems to properly collect and track milk productivity data of our farmers which makes management, planning, extension delivery, and other relevant services difficult to provide.
By digitizing traditionally analog processes, we’re effectively streamlining the daily administrative workload in milk procurement by capturing data at the farm gate.
During the partnership kickoff workshop organized by DigiFarm and 2SCALE in November, The KDPL board of directors and managers from the seven co-operative societies expressed confidence in the new system. Mr. William Githu, the Board Chair reiterated that adopting digital systems is just the start for KDPL’s vision to scale its reach to benefit many more smallholder farmers in the Mt. Kenya region. Mr. Githu added:
Manual bookkeeping practices are slow and prone to human error, for us to attain our vision we must adopt digital systems in our operations. Thanks to DigiFarm, today we get to implement a transformational system our societies badly needed.
Dairy Management Solution
KDPL is running a pilot of the DigiFarm’s Dairy Management Solution among the seven affiliate cooperatives societies in Nyeri county. During the period, milk data from more than 1,000 farmers of which 50% are women will be captured using digital weighing scales and posted into a cloud based digital database. An eReceipting system shall be used to send daily SMS notifications to farmers on milk procured directly to their mobile phones. Henk Van Dujin, Program Director - 2SCALE says: