Profiles of Resilience: Ndumberi Dairy Farmers Cooperative Supports Rural Kenyans

Nov 24, 2020

Francis Mihiu

Improving the livelihoods of peri-urban farmers

In Kenya, agriculture has long been the dominant industry. More than 40% of the population work in agriculture, including 70% of rural dwellers, and it directly and indirectly accounts for more than half of the country’s annual GDP. Still, food security among many Kenyans remains tenuous, with 36% of Kenya’s 54 million residents chronically food insecure. Land scarcity and an expanding population, which is expected to top 80 million over the next two decades, exacerbate the issue. But Ndumberi Dairy Farmers Co-operative Society Ltd., a small cooperative of just 1,054 members, each of whom raise up to five cows on small parcels of peri-urban land on the edge of Nairobi, shows how Kenyan farmers can improve food security and increase their incomes without harming the land.

When Ndumberi was founded in 1963, it joined a thriving agricultural cooperative movement, one that was vital to Kenya’s post-independence economy and led by example in poverty reduction and providing key social services. While many large-scale operations proved uncompetitive as the Kenya’s market opened up, Ndumberi is one of the few that has survived, continuing to operate nimbly with its committed membership and focus on value-added, small-scale production. With land scarce and recognizing the limitations of selling milk to only middlemen, Francis Mihiu sought to integrate operations and move up the value chain. Using a grant from the United States African Development Foundation (USADF) awarded in 2019, in the course of one year, Mihiu expanded Ndumberi’s operations to include pasteurization, yogurt-making, and the processing and selling of bulk milk. Before the pandemic, Ndumberi produced and sold 15,000 liters of milk per day, on average, of which 1,000 liters was pasteurized and 2,000 liters more was turned into yogurt, which can be sold at a higher price. Cutting out middlemen entirely, processing milk directly, and transporting it to market in new refrigerated trucks also increased revenue. Mihiu estimates that these changes have increased farmers’ incomes by more than 25%, and he anticipates the next phase of the cooperative’s expansion will boost them even further.

While the coronavirus pandemic has, unfortunately, hit the cooperative hard, Mihiu has used this experience to identify opportunities for expansion that will protect the organization from future shocks. Milk production has dropped by 4,000 liters per day because of the coronavirus and lingering effects of a 2019 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and import restrictions on the cooperative’s preferred fodder. Some members have been forced to quit farming entirely. Much of that milk wastes before it can be sold because of government-imposed curfews and constraints on market trading that limit sales opportunities. However, looking forward, Mihiu plans to expand into long-life boxed ultra-high-temperature milk processing to create a product that keeps for up to nine months, and also plans to start packaging the cooperative’s dairy products in-house. These modifications will enable a long shelf life for Ndumberi products, offer greater sales flexibility amid travel restrictions, and allow the cooperative to sell products directly for the milk-vending machines that rural Kenyans in remote areas rely on. Mihiu’s ingenuity and resourcefulness are enabling Ndumberi to continue contributing to Kenya’s food security during the pandemic and beyond.