And it’s a wrap

The past 2 weeks were all about testing our design and interviewing coffee farmers and factory managers. This week we moved back to Nairobi to interview several experts we had visited in our first trip as well, like Solidaridad, CMS and CRI (formerly CRF). Friday we finished our research by meeting up with Julius from UTZ and 2 people from TAHMO. And overall it seems that everyone we spoke to this last few weeks is very enthusiastic about the system we designed. There is a list of possible and/or necessary adjustments we will have to implement for our final design, but we believe it could become a very useful and very feasible system.

In Nyeri we mainly test the different aspects of the system we designed, using (paper and real-size wooden) prototypes and text messaging. In Nairobi we evaluated our design with experts, but also focused on implementation. Which parties could and/or should be involved? Who is going to pay and who will benefit? How (where, on what scale, when) should it be implemented? Should it be tested first? We wish we could provide you all the answers to these questions right here on this blog, but to make sure no one is going to steal our findings we will inform our partners about all this in our final report. But we can give you a small teaser of our conclusions:

-        It would be best to start a pilot set up somewhere in Kenya, to prove the added value of the weather stations and the operability of the forecast software on factory computers.

-        The wooden sign with the current weather forecast should not only be placed at coffee factories, since they are not visited all year long. There are several better places where the sign could also be placed, but then who will be responsible?

-        Every area in Kenya has its own languages. English and Swahili are usually fine, but we should keep in mind that in some less educated rural areas using these languages, or reading in general, could be a problem.

-        Coffee is cultivated throughout whole Africa, but of course not everywhere in Africa. For instance in Kenya the coffee is mostly cultivated in Central Kenya around mount Kenya.  TAHMO’s goal to place weather stations throughout Africa need to be taken into account when writing the implementation plan.

-        There are many players in the coffee market; the farmers, the coffee factories, the cooperatives, the marketing agents, the research institutions, the certifying bodies and the governmental parties. Favorable would be if all could benefit from this project. For us the task to figure out a way to make that happen.

-        The cooperatives we visited performed above average. They are well structured and have a good board. In the future the concept should be available for all the factories. So we need to learn from the factories we visited and maybe make an adaption for those less structured factories.

So this was the last blog from Kenya, the next one will be from the Netherlands where we will be finalizing our design and report in the next 4 weeks. We would like to thank all the people we spoke to in Kenya and all those who arranged our very valuable meetings we had. We would like to especially thank Julius from UTZ and Catherine from CMS for arranging most of our local contacts, as well as our reliable taxi drivers and comfortable place to stay in Nyeri. Thanks everyone and we will keep you posted!