Back in Nyeri

A new phase for our project has begun, starting by sending a (mostly) new group to Kenya. After 2 days in Nairobi, Wilco, Jaimie and Paulien have now arrived in Nyeri where they will stay for the coming two and a half weeks. Paulien also joined the first trip, so she knows how the things come around in Kenya. This is really an advantage for the project, as we do not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Since she already knows a lot of our local contacts personally and knows a lot of practical things (like where to do groceries in Nyeri) we are able to start with the project right away. For us personally it is also nice, because we are introduced to the people by Paulien and they had a good experience last time, so they seem to trust and like us from the beginning.

Yesterday we had our first meeting in Nyeri at the Thiruku factory. Of course we started with a short tour around the factory, as Wilco and Jaimie only saw this on the pictures the first group brought with them. A difference with the first visit was that now it is high season, so there were a lot of farmers bringing their cherries. This time instead of one weighing scale there were two weighing scales available. After this tour we started with the interview with one of the board members. He knows a lot about cultivating coffee, as he has a flourishing coffee farm himself. We explained our concept and asked him what he thought about it and what his recommendations would be. He liked the concept and got some useful insights from him. Unfortunately, we are not able to put all those nice insights online as we have to be careful due to confidentiality. Some interesting points were:

-        Instead of only sending weather information we decided to also allow factory employees to send factory specific information. This visit showed us what kind of information the factory would like to send to the farmers.

-        We showed a picture of the sign is designed to communicate weather data to the farmers. The sign looked alright and communicated the right things, but the colour of the text (which is now black) needs to be changed into green or blue. Later we figured out that this was because it would draw more attention.  

-        The computer program was seen as useful. The factory employee will need a training to learn the program, but then he will understand it and he will be able to use it.

Today we visited the DeKUT University to get a second opinion from a coffee expert on our project. The University has its own workshop, so we showed the picture of the sign to the head of the workshop and he was more than happy to help us building it. Tomorrow we are able to pick it up, so we can use it for observation at the factory.

In the afternoon we went to see our first farmer to test the concept from a different perspective. Of course this time we got the whole tour around the farm and for Jaimie and Wilco it was so nice to see all these things in real life and actually know what the others had been talking about. The farmer was really enthusiastic about the whole concept and he understood quite well what it was all about. His wife even took notes and sometimes gave some cleaver insights. The best recommendation that the farmer could make was ‘bring this concept to the factory as soon as possible’.

When we were talking to this farmer it started to rain and we were looking at each other smiling. Why would any person smile if it is starting to rain? Well, this is because we predicted that it would rain in the afternoon around that time. We are keeping an Excel with the weather predictions for the next days. At the end of the day we fill in what the actual weather did. And so far the predictions are luckily quite accurate. At least a lot more accurate than the weather forecasts farmers are currently receiving via TV or radio.

From tomorrow on we are going to test our concept with farmers. They will receive daily text messages (from us) about the weather for one week and at the end of the week we will talk to them about their experiences. So the weather predictions being quite accurate is a great help.

In short, the second group is now in Kenya and already gained a lot of insights. We are thankful for everybody making this project possible. We will keep you all updated!