Butterflies in the stomach!

Today was a very exiting day with a lot of learning. It started with walking down the street in front of our hotel, which we had not seen in daylight and outside of the car before. This is Africa! Everywhere you look, something is happening: look to your right, a man is claying something with clay from underneath the paving. Look to your left, a woman is sewing outside with her sewing machine, while the five men are sitting next to her are watching and greeting us.

We started with a meeting with David, who used to work at GIZ (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) and now works as a consultant on climate change projects. His focus lays mainly on tea, but since our final product preferably has to be applicable on all crops in all countries of the Sub Saharan Africa, his view on climate change was very interesting and valuable. The interview was conducted at the Java house, not a bad working place at all! Well, except for the exploding tire producing a huge bang at the gas station next to us, making everybody jump up from their seat...

In the afternoon we went to the JKUAT (Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology). After 45 minutes of browsing through the campus (which was beautiful, we could only wish for that many colourful flowers) we finally found the building where we needed to be. We were supposed to do a presentation for the chairman, a professor and a few students. The few students turned out to be 40 students of the mechanical and agricultural faculties. That did not increase the amount butterflies in our stomachs at all! The presentation was held in an interactive way, so the students could give their feedback on our project and could ask questions.

 According to us, the most important conclusions drawn from the interviews today are the following:

·       Coffee farmers are moving away from the monocrop, because it is not seen as affordable enough.

·       Farmers will need to create their own micro climate in order to increase their productivity. How will we, UTZ, TAHMO or anyone else convince them that this could be a profitable option? By proving it! Once they will have seen the results of creating this micro climate, they will believe it works but not before that. Seeing is believing.

·       Nowadays, all weather information is spread through i.a. radio stations and newspapers. This information is only a prediction of what could happen in general, not focussed on smaller regions of the country. The districts on which it is focused are too big. 
·       Phones are common in Kenya, also in the rural areas.

·       Selling crop insurances to farmers is a growing business. When a season has been bad for the farmers due to bad weather conditions, they can claim (a part) of the damage they suffered from it.

·       In Kenya there are multiple perceptions about farmers. For the youth farming is a unpopular of making a living. To deal with this perception there is a part about agribusiness in the newspapers in which young people explain about their ‘cool and rewarding’ farming experiences. Yet, their negative perception is not tackled yet.

·       If the farmers would drink their produced coffee themselves, they would be better able to recognise its quality. This could result in less distrust at the coffee auction.
Coffee is becoming a more common drink in Kenya, but currently it is mostly drunk as instant coffee.

·       An advice for our onsite research: the farmers are the experts! We want to learn from them, they are very important to our research.

·       Kenyans seem to perceive the European restrictions on chemicals as an action to put their production down, as if we are afraid of their growing economy. We should be aware that questions about this topic will arise during the remaining of our research.

Again, we thank you all for working together with us, we could use a good night's rest right now, so good night everybody!