In Kenya, cooperative societies are associated with older people – 55 years and above. The main reason for this is that most cooperatives in Kenya have their roots in farming, and as data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics reveals, the average age of a farmer in Kenya is 60 years.
While this fact is 10 years old, the analysis of the just released 2019 census will later provide us with a different figure. However, not a bigger difference is expected.
Observations and trends however indicate that more young people are getting into farming, from the interest to the practical level. The limitation is that this pool is yet to get to a ‘mass movement’ status.
But should it? Not necessarily. Why? Because emerging technologies are enabling small farms to produce higher yields and therefore, we may have fewer youth farmers, producing much more than the older farmers from same acreage.
If we take the case of coffee for instance, we have recently witnessed a farmer harvesting 50 kilos of coffee from a single stem, yet the national average of coffee production per stem in Kenya is 2 kilos.
What this means that such a farmer, with 1,000 stems, fitting in one and a half acre, is able to produce 50,000 kilos per year. The traditional farmer will need 35 acres of coffee to produce the same quality.
Cooperatives are however not only a reserve for farming. Today, many young people are involved in cooperatives through what is popularly known as ‘chamas’, which are essentially collective savings, credit and investment schemes.
Some of the reasons our great grandfathers decided to form cooperatives were to enable them to market their produce collectively, save collectively, buy inputs like fertilizers collectively and borrow loans from the pooled funds.
Luke Kinoti, a financial guru with over 30 years’ experience in Kenya and abroad, an astute businessman in various sectors, an enthusiast for small businesses and a philanthropist says this role of cooperatives will not change.
Kinoti says as many youths get into productive sectors like farming, food processing and general manufacturing, they should embrace the model of cooperative which offers opportunities to grow from the village to a global level.
“Cooperatives are becoming more relevant,” said Kinoti in an interview with the Financial Day.
“But the cooperative of the future will be of fewer members, say 20 and more focused and run by professionals,” says Kinoti.
For instance, 15 youth farming potatoes may likely to form a group not just for collective marketing but also to combine resources to process the produce into chips, package and market.
Kinoti says the next type of cooperatives must add value to whatever the members produce, optimize the value of money contributed by the members and increase efficiency in the processes that define the production, processing and marketing of the commodities it deals with.
“The future cooperatives will be easy to manage and focused on one product. In Rwanda for instance, this kind of small cooperative that is focused on a specific product has started to emerge,” said Kinoti, who has worked with small businesses in India, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa and Ghana among many other countries.
“There is a need for farmers to engage more in cooperatives and employ professionals to run them,” says Kinoti.
It is not just about the actual farming, says Kinoti, as youths should explore opportunities within the chain, like processing.
“Young people who have been trained in food processing can go to the market or buy food from the farm and then process it. For instance, we should process more of peanut butter or banana jam to substitute other kinds of margarine Kenyans have consumed for long. Low hanging opportunities also exist in bee farming and processing of the honey.”
“Young people should identify quick wins even from the household level, like processing yoghurt from milk. This concept of household-level processing has been successful in India.”
He says when this happens, it does not only create wealth for the processor but also makes villages prosperous as villagers trade among themselves and therefore less money flows out.
“One way for rural communities can prosper is to ensure that money does not go out of the village. This is achieved when there are diversified goods and services offered by the villagers and also when value addition is enhanced to ensure people do not go far to look for certain products.”
Kinoti, a mentor and corporate leader says such small steps will eventually grow into a bigger business when the youth concentrate on them and become consistent.
“If you concentrate, you get scale and when you get scale, you get rich. Consistency creates specialty which is self-marketing.”