Day 8: Today was to be market day for LIME. The LIME project was supposed to buy 1000 herds from the pastoralists. Unfortunately due to the draught and the market conditions of the 1000 herds requested, a month ago, only 130 turned up at the holding ground. Furthermore the weighing bridge was vandalised. I wonder if there is a connection between the draught the high market price yesterday the herds not turning up and the weighing bridge being vandalised. Maybe I am being too suspicious. So after discussing with the representatives from the Pastoralists Production Community (PPC) Yussuf called for another buying day next Thursday by then there should be more cattles and the other 3 PPCs that did not respond today might turn up which will provide an economical herd that can be trekked to Mombasa.
Today I’ve seen two things that I’ve never seen before: termite’s mounds and dead cows by the side of the road. I am so used that dead animal are removed from the side of the road that, seeing a totally decomposed cow is quite “impressive”. You do see decomposed animal in Europe but these are normally small rodents or small birds not fully grown cows.
So the activity we had planned for today did not go quite according to plan so we did a bit of desk study. Lynette provided us with the Market study of the Livestock industry in Kenya and more specifically in Garissa. I was quite surprised how detail the study was; it provided hard data and full cost and profit analysis for various supply chains ... quite impressive. I guess Care Enterprise Partners is really serious about “making markets working for the poor”. We also started discussing some of the issues among ourselves and realised there is a lot of work to do but we seem to agree on the direction we need to take. We’ll see how the team dynamics will pan out but I have full confidence on our abilities and hopefully we will be able to come up with useful recommendations in the end!