Thursday 15 Sept - another interesting day

Today we had no power at Runda, I went to the village market to send e-mails, then went on the meetings in town.
In the morning I met Ivy from Action Aid, she is a Kenyan living in Nairobi but her claim to fame is that she travelled in a Matatu initially in East Africa from Malawi through Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya to Mombasa, then the Matatu went by boat to Italy, then they went on through Germany and France to England. In London she met Tony Blair, then went on to Scotland arriving in time for the G8 march in Edinburgh, then she went to Auchterarder and met some of Dave Prentice’s friends. Through her I have found out that Action Aid have an office in Kisumu and have support projects with local people in the Kakamega area. One possibility is to utilise the Farmers Own lorry to help small farmers move their sugar crop to Kisumu. Dr Oluoch is keen to see us using our transport to help small farmers while we are waiting for bigger projects to start. I am going to find someone with transport experience to talk to.
In the afternoon Jacky and I visited ATC where we met Volken Hesse. ATC is based at Kenya Cooperative Collage, Karen
The Kenya Cooperative College and the German funding partners including DED have established a training centre called ATC, this is a business venture so that revenue covers operating costs. ATC provide training courses for farmers eg they are starting a new course in Kakamega next week. They seem to be trying to work with co-operatives. Core areas are farming as a business, business organisation, marketing, and training of trainers. Currently ATC have 26 trainers and can give courses anywhere in Kenya. They are considering setting up a training course for eurepgap (organic) certification.
ATC identify clients who pay for training and also identify partners who can join in, they are willing to consider new partners.
DED also have collaboration with KFW a German bank who are sponsoring an irrigation project for smallholders in Central Region (Embu and Meru). This programme is also looking for partners.
The partners site on the board of ATC and on the Council of the Collage, they act as technical advisors. It might be possible for Farmers Own to be one of the partners in future. They are willing to have a presentation at one of their committee meetings which take place at the college. The next meeting is 25 Oct but this is likely to be taken up with MOU matters, seems as if we should present at the next but one in December.