Managing for Impact: the case of Kalali women dairy cooperative society

By Monica Gakindi



This year’s IFAD East and Southern Africa Regional Implementation workshop was held on the 14th – 18th November in Arusha, Tanzania. The theme of the workshop was “managing for impact”. Unlike previous workshops, this workshop was organized in such a way that there was more learning and sharing coming from the project staff and workshop participants. As indicated by the IFAD ESA outgoing director – Ides de Willebois, recent years had seen a change in how the workshops were being facilitated – from a top down reporting approach which was more focused on financial/grant management to a participatory learning approach where the project staff “owned” and participated more in the discussions which were now more inclined to performance improvement.

The Cooperative



On the second day of the workshop, participants had a chance to visit different groups that either directly or indirectly, received funding from IFAD. I had the chance to visit the Kalali women dairy cooperative that is located in Machame Division, Hai District in Kilimanjaro region. Here we met a group of cheerful women who were eagerly awaiting our visit to tell their story. The chairlady of the cooperative Mrs. Kidin, the idea of this project emanated from a dairy community business whereby local people bought and sold milk to each other. There was also abundant milk production in Hai District, providing a very good opportunity for a dairy business to grow.

The cooperatives objectives

The cooperative was started way back in 1988 with the aim of helping the women, especially those that were sole breadwinners in their homes to improve their incomes. At its initiation, the cooperative had 160 members. Today it boasts of 250 and has aspirations of recruiting more. The business objectives of the cooperative are;
- To promote social economic development and well being of the surrounding community as well as to build new skills and provide knowledge to its members on different perspectives that would establish a proper ground for them to develop as well as properly manage viable enterprises.
- To provide access of education to orphans and students who come from very low income families and who perform well in different levels of education
- To grant loans to members and people with genuine problems in community
- To conduct a number of trainings/seminars and workshops to the dairy farmers on goo dairying husbandly including general dairy education on battle management and hygienic handling of milk in order to improve milk production as well as quality of milk and its products.
- To create and maintain a conducive environment for developing dairy farming as a self income generating business among the members, majority of whom are unemployed and uneducated.
- To develop competent entrepreneurs and fight against AIDS & HIV

The project started off with 8 cows that were given as donations by some good Samaritans from Italy. By 1995, the cooperative had 41 milk producing cows. Since most of their objectives are geared towards giving back to the community, they strategized on how they could benefit the community from the start. Once a member receives a dairy cow, she is required to donate to the cooperative a litre of milk everyday which is given to the kindergarten in the orphanage. This is done till the cow calves thrice. In addition, once the cow calves, the owner is supposed to feed and care for it for a period of seven months after which it is taken back to the cooperative in order to benefit another member. If the calve is a bull, once it gets to the age of seven months, it is taken back to the cooperative and sold. The money is used to buy a heifer which in turn benefits another member of the cooperative.
Up to now, 117 women have benefited from the project and 24 women have finished their contracts and now own the cows.

From the business perspective, the cooperative started off by selling milk to a contractor in the year 2000. This initially went on well until the company collapsed and the cooperative lost approximately 12 million TZ shillings. This was a big blow for the members who had relied on the sale of milk to feed their families and take their children to school. However, this was also a turning point for the group since they started thinking of ways to diversify their business. They sent some representatives to an agricultural show where they learnt that apart from the sale of fresh milk, they could engage in the production of other dairy products like cheese, yoghurt and sour milk. Through the Italian good Samaritans who had initially donated the cows to the group, they were able to acquire machines to process the cheese and yoghurt.

Diversification

To further diversify their business opportunities, they started processing livestock feeds, bought a maize milling machine that is located at the shopping centre and also a sunflower pressing machine which they use to produce sunflower oil.

Through the returns from the various businesses, they have been loaning members money at an interest rate of 3% per month. This has currently stopped after facing some challenges of members defecting in payments and officials engaging in corrupt deals. This has led to the cooperative losing millions of shillings and in mistrust amongst the members.

Giving back to the community

As a way of giving back to the community, the cooperative has also engaged in helping the very poor through taking their kids to primary, secondary and tertially education. They started with 2 students and up to now, more than 10 students have completed secondary education and some to the university level with degrees in agriculture, medicine and early childhood education.


More challenges




Apart from the challenges of losses due to fraud and the collapse of the company that the cooperative sold milk mentioned above, the cooperative is facing a number of other challenges. These include:
- Electricity shortages – When power is lost, this affects their products which go stale leading to losses
- Market – they have not been able to penetrate to all the parts of the country and hence the sales are not as much as they would wish
- Competition – They receive competition from similar products in the market that are of better quality and are well packaged
- Expertise – They have no technical expertise and hiring/contracting one is very expensive
- Taxation and regulation procedures – Most of their packaging materials are imported from Kenya and getting clearance for them is expensive and takes time
- Capacity and training of staff and farmers – They lack the training to staff and to farmers on how to handle and care for the cows, which has led to poor quality of milk hence products.

The cooperatives aspirations



Despite all these, they still have aspirations of getting better and bigger in terms of products and also increasing and improving the structures of their membership. Kidi shared with us more on their aspirations:
- To have all women in the area become members of the cooperative
- To give dividends to all the members and not just provide contributions in kind
- To create more employment opportunities
- To send all children to school
- To expand the sunflower pressing business
- To innovate and continuously provide new services to the community
- To provide capacity building
- To build technical and leadership skills and groom local talents
- To set up a milk bar so that community members understand that there are other options to drinking alcohol
- To do more follow-ups and have a better feel what you can realistically achieve
- To develop robust business plans

From realising their challenges, Kalali women dairy cooperative society is a step ahead in achieving and realising their goals to the fullest. Through the resilience and seeking intervention to become more innovative to increase their business potential, the women stand a better chance of achieving the intended impact in society as set out in their goals and objectives. We wish them success in everything that they do and hope that they will realise their goals sooner.

For me, a great lesson to learn from these great women is that for impact to be achieved, be it in a business or development perspective, the vision/goal must be clear from the beginning. Whatever challenges/obstacles you meet on the way should only be a turnaround time for thinking of better and more innovative ways to achieve the set goal.