Friday 23 September

I met Lau Larson one of the directors of Farmers Own here in Kenya. Lau is Danish and his wife is Irish and they run a number of successful businesses here in Nairobi, some to do with food processing. He has a lot of experience recruiting and training local managers and retaining a dedicated workforce.
Jacky and I met Pastor Mwasua, at the Seventh Day Adventists, and it turned out that he is chairman of ADRA the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. The next day we saw George Baiden of ADRA and we discovered that they have food growing projects in Kericho and west, their area borders on the Kakamega area. They are interested in sustaining communities and are keen on collaboration but we need to work out how that could work, they want us to come up with some ideas for discussion.
Jacky and I met Leonard Obidha, the secretary of the Poverty Eradication Commission (PEC). I explained that word ‘Limited’ will be removed from Farmers Own as soon as the Attorney General can move the backlog of papers created by the new constitution. Leonard is very pleased about this and explained that this would allow them to move on the Memorandum of Understanding and he expected that we could benefit from funding from their side as they have a number of donors working with them. I invited him to attend the Rockefeller meeting on 30 Sept as Dr Oluoch is not available. It turns out that the PEC are travelling around the country that week to see progress on various projects they are sponsoring, however he is willing to divert to attend our meeting.
We are trying to get a meeting with Micro Enterprise Support Programme run by DANIDA but they have been very busy since returning from the summer break and the earliest we can see them is late October.
I am setting off tomorrow to go to Kakamega to meet government officials including the DC and the farmers and to set up a programme for Elly Janssen from ICCO who will visit there on 5 and 6 October. So there will be no postings till end of next week.