Tuesday 13 September – a good day

This morning I had a very good meeting with Dr Oluoch, Chairman of the Poverty Eradication Commission, this morning, he is really very keen on the Farmers Own concept. He gave me some strong advice, my first priorities as far as he is concerned should be as follows:-
Talk to the lawyers about the change of registration of Farmers Own here in Kenya so that it is registered as a company limited by guarantee (ie a charity) and not as at present registered as a company limited by shares. We need this urgently to work with the Ministry and with the donors who have to know that FO is a charity according to its registered status here in Kenya.
He also wants a summary report of the ABLH/FO work in Central over the last 10 years to show successes, learning points and what finally happened to this project. What need to be done to have a sustainable project in Central ?
On a separate point he is interested in the status of the Make Poverty History campaign in UK and some information we heard on BBC world about not being able to advertise on UK TV.
This afternoon Jacky and I met Nelly and Tom at their CAFOD HQ here in Nairobi. CAFOD is a Catholic Church Aid organisation and their regional HQ covers all the East Africa community. They work with NGO’s by providing funding in agreed areas. They are keen on sustainability and interestingly they are supporting organic food production in Uganda and Tanzania and a little bit in Kenya. They recommended us to talk to Sacred Africa who are working in Bungoma on an organic farming project.
They are prepared to consider funding a small project in Western to help keep us going so Jacky, Laban and I will work on that.
They are interested in funding a project in Marsabit and strangely enough I spent the weekend with Guio who is an educated small farmer from Marsabit and who is prepared to be a leader of an Farmers Action group there.