I am currently in the lobby of the Hotel Palmers in Kisumu and catching up on the writing that I have neglected for the past few days. Tomorrow morning (Sunday), I will be picked up and taken to spend the week at Mumias Sugar Company. The goal is to try and initiate a relationship with the organization so that future generations of Masters students will be able to intern in Mumias. I am the guinea pig, so to speak, and my job will be to meet as many people in management as possible, and convince the ‘powers that be’ that all SPEA students are as smart, charming and hardworking as myself. Kidding!! But I AM supposed to schmooze and make as good of an impression as possible. With that in mind, I am also multi-tasking and doing some company research so that I will at least appear to be well informed when I get there. However, I should actually be talking about the past week in Nyanza Province, which was our destination after Nakuru.
As I have mentioned in past posts, our boss at KEFRI is interested in getting us to contribute to a reforestation project being undertaken in southwestern Kenya. The project site is near a town called Suba in a region known as the Gwassi Hills. Here are the details. A Dutch foundation is financing a project called Green Forest Social Investment (GFSI) focused on regional poverty reduction through three main approaches: 1) economic development, 2) social transformation and 3) environmental restoration. The main theme is based on promoting integration amongst the three approaches – you could call it sustainable business. The investor set up an organization in the form of an LLC, with three main divisions: 1) GFSI Limited, 2) GFSI Trust and 3) Microfinance. Limited is responsible for marketing, Trust for technical expertise and Microfinance for providing credit services. The facility houses two state-of-the-art charcoal burners, a honey-processing facility, a facility for producing biodiesel and equipment for processing aloe vera.
If you are poor and living in rural Kenya, opportunities to improve your situation are limited. Suba is exceptionally remote, and the main forms of subsistence are either farming or fishing. Enter GFSI. First of all, the organization – with the help of KEFRI - provides seeds and seedlings of indigenous trees to landowners and farmers to begin reforesting the area. As the trees grow, they are pruned by farmers, and the wood sold to GFSI where it is burned, and turned into charcoal. The product is available for sale to the local community, but is also loaded onto boats at a recently constructed landing and shipped to Kisumu for sale.
Wood assembled by species and size for carbonization - I don't recall the tonnage, but the material you see here is sufficient to run the charcoal kiln for only about a week.
Concurrently, farmers are taught how to keep bees and to build hives - GFSI lends them equipment and provides training. The key here is that the trees that have been planted are, for the most part, flowering. So as the trees grow, they are also providing the raw materials for honey, which is then sold to GFSI, which extracts it and sells it at premium prices around the country. As farmers periodically provide honey, they are essentially paying off the ‘loan’ of equipment.
Also, GFSI provides the seeds of two plants called jatropha and croton (this one is actually a tree), whose fruits are sources for producing biodiesel. As the plants grow and bear fruit, it is harvested and sold to GFSI, where it is processed locally. The ethanol is then sold in Kenya or exported.
Finally, because the land is so arid, it is ideal for growing aloe vera. You guessed it. The aloe is sold to GFSI, who process it, and sell the raw material to the larger market.
Aloe Vera being cultivated on the GFSI site.
The whole idea here is to provide opportunity to a poor, rural community that has no access to larger markets and little chance to learn new skills. Instead of providing cash like many organizations, GFSI is instead providing training and equipment with which community members can augment meager incomes derived from paltry maize crops and declining catches. The initial investment length is for five years, at the end of which the business will hopefully be self-sustaining. Of course, the business model is not-for-profit. No dividends are paid, and the investor and contributor are only trying to break even. All profits are shared with the community and as you probably gathered from above, GFSI is essentially making a market for the Gwassi community. With the exception of management, all the labor that is employed is local. Product can be loaded onto ferries at the lakeshore and cheaply shipped to the city of Kisumu for sale. The model is new, but if successful, will be replicated at other sites around the world.
The project was very well thought out. I spoke with most of the management team and I could not come up with one detail for which they had not accounted. Two and a half years into the investment term, community buy-in has been enthusiastic and honey production is expanding rapidly as more hives come on-line. The biodiesel plant, which will contribute the most to revenue, is still being built. The only snag I saw was that capacity of the charcoal burners was too great to warrant operation at the efficient level. There simply is not enough wood around the region to warrant turning on the big burner – it is not cost-effective. The organization is looking at importing other sources of fuel so that the carbonization process can resume.
My job will be to make a business plan for KEFRI, which is contributing the majority of the seeds. Basically, I will have to figure out exactly how much we have contributed and how much it cost, then forecast how much we can expect to contribute till the end of the investment term. I’m guessing that I’ll have to factor in the success rates of the different species of seed and there will probably be some form of discounting involved. Sorry, I’m just thinking on paper here. Anyway, hopefully I will be able to draw some conclusions that will be beneficial to both GFSI and KEFRI.
Now that I’ve explained the business model, I can rave about the honey. Acacia honey is fantastic. Plain and simple. The honey it makes is a dark, golden brown and I must say, it tastes pretty darn good when drizzled on toast in the morning, or even when licked off of the nearest spoon (not that I would do that). The farmers around here are also encouraged to plant large quantities of sunflowers. Not only are the oil and seeds marketable, but sunflower honey is the clearest yellow, and locally, more popular than the acacia variety. Myself, I am partial to both. Every time I think of selling organic, free trade, acacia honey from Suba, Kenya, I imagine a stampede of hippies and soccer moms rushing through the double doors of Whole Foods to get at it.
This entry is not quite in the right order for my taste. I find myself at the end of a long explanation of a social business, and I haven’t even mentioned the trek there. And for sure, it was a trek. I am guessing that the Gwassi Hills lie between 150 and 200 miles from Nakuru, where I ended the last entry. About a 3 hour trip, right? Wrong. It takes 11 hours to go from Nakuru to Gwassi in a 4x4 truck. On the downside, we were crammed into the back of a Toyota for 10 hours. On the upside, we got to see just a fantastic amount of country and we had a new driver who could both see and hear.
We left Nakuru at dawn and started heading west through Rift Valley Province. Rift Valley and the central parts of Nyanza make up the ‘bread-basket’ of Kenya, though ‘maize-basket’ might be more appropriate. The road from Nakuru to Kisumu on Lake Victoria passes through some of the richest farmland in the country. Interestingly, Rift Valley is also where the majority of the domestic tea crop is cultivated. The highway is two lanes for the entire distance to Kisumu, and passes into a series of highlands where the tea plantations are located. I had never seen a commercial tea plantation before and they are really very striking. From the road, a field of tea plants looks like one giant box hedge. The leaves are bright, young-leaf green and the shrubs are planted closely together so that the leaves and twigs intertwine solidly together at about waist-height. Workers wear canvas waders for protection, and you can see groups of them wading through the plants grabbing handfuls of leaves and stuffing them into large sacks. Although there are some small, privately owned farms, most of what we passed were large commercial operations, where the bright green tea stretched over the hills for hundreds of acres. I would have really liked to have put on a pair of the canvas pants and waded out into one of the immense fields, just to run my hands over the leaves, in the spirit of ‘Gladiator’ and the field of wheat.
This trip further solidified my impression that Kenya is mostly one big farm. We did not pass one natural forest during the whole epic journey. Though the land is green and lush, it is only a series of small, interconnected shambas, and the green is that of tall corn and waving banana leaves.
After a brief stop for tea (I was craving it for some strange reason), we arrived in Kisumu, the third largest city in Kenya after Nairobi and Mombasa. As often as I have looked at a map of Kenya, for some reason I had no idea that the vast lake spread out before me was the famous Lake Victoria. I was thinking it was another Rift Valley lake like Naivasha, and because no one else was talking about it, I kept my mouth shut as well. We headed through town to a village on the shore and had the local specialty: fresh caught tilapia fried whole, with ugali and kales. True to local tradition, we ate it all with our hands. Dad, you would have been proud – I grossed out my Kenyan companions when I started crunching on the fins. However, I was myself grossed out when my boss cracked open his fish’s head.
We rushed from our greasy, though fresh, lunch to catch the ferry across to the south shore of the lake. I still had no clue which lake we were about to cross, but an explanation still had not come up in any conversation, so I maintained my peace. We waited about an hour at the landing on the lakeshore for the ferry to arrive and in the meantime, watched an African fish eagle flutter from perch to perch in the surrounding trees, and a big water monitor lizard swimming. There are no power boats on this part of Lake Victoria. The boats are home-made, and though they may have a small motor stowed somewhere, the main means of locomotion is still through large triangular sails.
Sailboats on Lake Victoria.
The ferry pulled in and we backed the truck into one of the two spaces for vehicles. The accumulated crowd boarded, the engine rumbled and the boat lurched, starting the thirty minute crossing. It was somewhat of a tight fit. The ferry is not very large and people were shoulder to shoulder around the two vehicles that fit on board. As we pulled away from the landing, I distinctly saw a hippo sink out of sight off of the right railing.
Though I still was not aware that I was taking a ferry across Lake Victoria, some discussion of the lake needs to be made. Lake Victoria is dying. Three nations claim a border along the lakeshore: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The population around the Lake is burgeoning, and it’s waters act as a waste receptacle for three different countries, municipal, industrial or otherwise. Extensive deforestation along the banks and watersheds are leading to increased silt content and suspended matter, compounded by the manure and fertilizer that most of such runoff contains. The increased nitrogen content of the water has resulted in huge problems with water hyacinth, an invasive species that is gradually taking over the water’s surface. Many of the native fish are now extinct, a result of the introduction of tilapia and Nile perch for commercial purposes (FYI, the indigenous fish in these parts are the cichlids, that we all learned about when discussing natural selection). I forget the actual statistic, but the tonnage of fish harvested and exported to Europe and Asia is just astounding. However, that number is steadily declining as fish populations are continually overharvested. In fact, fishermen have been forced to use nets with smaller and smaller mesh in order to catch anything. As you drive along the streets in Kisumu, you see baskets and baskets of minnows and fry.
The situation around Lake Victoria is an indicator of why projects like GFSI are so important. By reforesting, runoff and siltation are controlled. With different methods to obtain income, community members can pursue other means of employment, reducing pressure on fish populations. Further, with increased discretionary income, community members can afford to think about preserving their environment instead of wondering where they will find their next meal. However, any truly viable effort at restoring the Lake can only be achieved through cooperation between the countries that border it.
The landscape changes significantly once the ferry pulls into the southern dock. Whereas the Kisumu region benefits from the rain shadow cast by the Lake, Gwassi does not. Though rocky, Kisumu is decidedly green. The maize is tall and the road crossed numerous small rivers and creeks – often the piki-piki (motorcycle) drivers would park their vehicles in the shallows for a quick wash. The Gwassi region is arid. It looks a good bit like the mountains around Las Vegas and Lake Powell – high, rocky ridges covered in scrub, aloe vera and plumeria, which look like spineless suarajo cacti. The roads are all gravel and hard packed dirt. As we traced along the top of a ridge, I watched a saker falcon flying fast and stiff winged over our heads.
We were all excited when our boss informed us that our route would take us through Ruma National Park. In the 15 minutes it took to cross the park, it looked like the classic picture of African savannah that you see in magazines – tall, waving amber grass and scattered acacias with their strange flattened crowns. It was not long before we spotted a herd of giraffes through the trunks of the trees, so we unloaded briefly and snapped a few pictures. The park looks like a great place to take a tour – you are supposed to be able to see lion, hyena, leopard, giraffe (of course), and most of the common antelope. The prize though, is seeing a roan – this is one of the only places you can see them in Kenya.
After 4 hours of dirt roads and desert, we reemerged back onto the lakeshore and sunset. The ferry from Kisumu cuts across a narrow, out-flung arm of Lake Victoria, with several small islands, which was one of the reasons why I was not sure of which lake it was that we were crossing. However now that we had moved away from the narrowest portion, there was no difference between the Lake and the ocean, or the Gulf of Mexico. We were looking straight west, to a perfectly flat horizon and the sun slowly dipping into the water. There were no houses or people, just our small group, the dusty road through the scrub, the Lake and the setting sun. There was no mistaking it – I was looking at Lake Victoria.
We finally turned onto a rutted road and made our way up to a set of cliffs looking over the Lake, where the project facility was located. After entering the metal gate, passing huge piles of wood stacked for charcoal and some warehouses, we emerged onto the cliff face where the staff and guesthouses were located. The place was swank. Arranged around a small bar and restaurant with a tall, thatched roof was a row of small houses with tin roofs and canvas walls, set upon individual concrete slabs. Each tent had working bathrooms, a flat screen television, and the best part – a king size four-poster bed, complete with white linen and draped in mosquito nets. The walls snapped and rustled in the breeze coming from the lake and the light from the sunset passed faintly the canvas, giving the whole structure a strange feeling of luxury. My first thought after I threw my pack on the bed and looked out the mesh door at the sunset was, “I could live here.”
That night I dined on pasta carbonara, Pat on pizza and Leah the Vegetarian on vegetables in peanut sauce, all washed down with ice cold Tuskers. It was an unbelievable feeling not to eat chicken, ugali and kales for the first time in a week. Also, they were selling glasses of Johnny Walker Red Label at the unbelievable price of 200 shillings (the exchange rate is currently about 90 KES to 1 USD)! Please leave me in this place!
It was dark by the time I walked out of the restaurant and stumbled back to the homelike interior of my tent. The stars were as bright as I have ever seen and I was looking out upon the blackness of the lake. Hundreds of tiny points of light slowly spread from shore across the darkness of the water as fishermen lit up gas lights and set their nets for the night. I unzipped the mesh front of my tent, washed my face and fell into clean sheets for the first time in a week. As I lay in the bed, surrounded by the gauze of mosquito nets and listening to the rustling of the walls, I watched the shadow of bats circling the faint luminance of the gaslight hanging just outside the entrance. I couldn’t tell you the last time I have slept so well.
Pictures soon and I hope there aren’t too many grammatical errors here – I would proof it but I am about to walk out the door and I feel the need to post! Don’t judge me if there are, they will get corrected as I reread it. Pictures soon!
YOU! Solidly done. Educational and enjoyable. Watch out for Africa Sleeping Sickness with all that lake swimming!
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