Almost to Kenya

Dear all,

Here our first real message on our blog:

We finally booked our flight! The thirteenth of October, Irma and Myrthe will fly to Nairobi. The nineteenth Paulien will join them and on the eleventh of November they will fly back to Delft.

We will start with visiting companies in Nairobi, to complete the overall research. Julius from the company UTZ certified will be our guide/mentor there, he brought us into contact with many companies and therefore we are grateful to him. The meetings are not planned on exact moments yet, but we are in contact with multiple companies. We hope to visit the iHub (a technology and innovation community), Farmforce (information service provider for farmers), KMS (the Kenya Meteorological Service), Rainforest (similar company to Nairobi), Solidaridad (strives to fair and sustainable production) and many more.

Our second stay will be in Nyeri, since there are multiple coffee farms present in and around Nyeri. There we have a tight schedule as well since we will again visit companies, a university and coffee farms. We will start with visiting Catherine from CMS (Coffee Management Services), she will be our guide/mentor in Nyeri. Visits we planned there will be with the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, Regina Pacis University Collega, Mutheka Cooperation, Kihuyo Factory and Thiriku Cooperation.

We are thrilled to visit all the stakeholders and eager to learn more about coffee farming in Kenya. Whether we will manage to visit them all, who knows?! We’ll try to make it work!!

In the meantime, Jaimie and Wilco will finish up our research report and start the next phase: creating ideas to solute the main problem we will find during our field research. When together in Delft, we will give the presentation of phase one and immediately finish phase two (the conceptualization) as well, since Paulien, Wilco and Jaimie will leave to Kenya at the end of November. There, they will test the concept we chose and optimize where necessary.

We will use this blog to tell you what we have done and we hope we will manage to draw conclusions of our visits and publish them here as well.

You’ll hear from us soon!