The month of October being “Economic and Community Development Month”, Rotary Club of Nairobi guest speaker on 19th October 2017 was Mr. Haron Wachira who spoke to members and visitors on the topic “Seven Keys to Turning Around Kenya’s Rural Poverty”.
Haron Wachira has a long background, starting in his twenties as editor of the then popular youth magazine, Step to his days as an IT manager and consultant with Pricewaterhouse Coopers to running several ICT ventures. But today, he lives and works in rural Kenya, working with farmers to apply proven business process engineering approaches to improve their agricultural production. Says he: It does not matter whether you are producing a magazine, or making a computer, or automating a business process. I have done them all — successfully. And I can tell you the same processes apply to keeping bees or registering a carbon offset program or growing vegetables and processing them to final products.”
In successful agricultural production among small scale farmers, Haron breaks down the steps as below, and that is what he will be talking to us about:
- Functional rural production groups;
- Efficient aggregation;
- Efficiently Integrated technical support;
- Efficient Access to capital/inputs;
- Practical value addition (across the value chain)
- Access to pre-negotiated markets – by-passing brokers
- The seventh, efficient deployment of ICT, is required at all above six levels.
Mr. Wachira enlightened the Club members and visitors on effective and efficient manners in which farming should be practiced, as well as addressing several pertinent matters regarding economic and community development, generation of employment and sustaining farming businesses.
The Club having a diverse and multicultural membership also celebrated the Hindu Festival Diwali with the sharing of some sweets.
