Cherubet

The Problem

Malnutrition is prevalent among women, and children under the age of five in Kenya. In addition, urban centres, especially informal settlements, experience acute food insecurity, worsened by diminished labour opportunity and Covid-19 restrictions. Our project will address the following two main challenges which will symbiotically facilitate the two private sector partners in this project to create jobs and contribute to their sustainability:

1. Limited production of tradeable volumes of beans (including micronutrient-rich high iron beans) to attract sustainable markets. This can be broken down into lack of skills in bean grain production and lack of sustainable market for the bean grains (partly because of low and unattractive tradable volumes of grain);
2. Limited capacity in processing and supplying the market with nutritious and affordable food (consisting of beans or mixtures with beans) to the working people in an urban setting.

To tackle the challenges above our consortium aims to create an end-to-end intermediary that builds on large, secured demand from buyers and engages with farmers to build loyalty and improve productivity and crop quality.

The Solution

This project will link Cherubet Company Ltd, Abosi Top Hill FCS, and Kaplomboi Rotu FCS  in a mutually beneficial supply and demand relationship. Abosi and Kaplomboi will produce HIB grain from at least 300 smallholder farmers in Sotik Sub-County, Bomet County, Kenya and provide jobs to youth (including young women) and meet the Cherubet demand of at least 2MT of HIB per week for its food processing plant located in Nairobi. Cherubet, in turn, will sell its products through i) supermarket retail chains, building on its current product portfolio; ii) a new distributorship of at least 200 retailers (kiosks) in urban industrial parks and informal settlements servicing working-class people.

The consortium will provide youth with employment opportunities in the production and sale of nutritious beans and bean-based processed products. We will build youth’s capacity to produce tradeable volumes of high-yielding bean grains, attracting them into farming by providing them with bean threshers and motorised pumps, and setting up a processed product distribution network for products requiring room temperature storage. These efforts will create at least 500 jobs.

Additionality 

CFYE’s support will help the project to be better designed, proceed more quickly, and reach more young people than it otherwise would have. With the funding from CFYE, the consortium will provide jobs to at least 500 youths by August 2023. The contribution will also open up the possibility of tripling the number to at least 1500 by 2025, through scaling in grain production and expanded distributorship of supermarkets and kiosks.

On top of the grant, CFYE’s technical assistance will strengthen our gender focus and help us reach more young women.