All you need is a business idea for funds

Joseph Mungai left his hotel job in Dubai and returned to Kenya to help farmers with great agribusiness ideas achieve their dreams.

His mission started in Kirinyaga County, where he has helped several farmers groups to present documents that have attracted funding from both local and international financiers.

Mr Mungai set up Mkulima Empowerment Foundation (MeF) which links farmers with innovative ideas to non-refundable funds.
He talked to Seeds of Gold:

What were you doing before venturing into agribusiness?

I used to work Dubai as a reception manager at the Sheraton Hotel. I met many Kenyans who kept asking me what I was doing in a foreign country yet there were so many opportunities back home.

Though I was not seeing the opportunities, I came back anyway in 2007 and got a job with Plan International as a community appraisal manager. I had earlier earned a diploma in business administration from Kabete Technical Institute.

So how did you find yourself in agriculture?

Back home in Kirinyaga I could see women holding gallons of milk at 6am waiting for middlemen to come and take the milk at the price determined by the brokers. I felt sorry for the fleecing that was going on. I thought of doing something that would impact on their lives in a bigger way.

That was when I looked around, and attended workshops on accessing finance. I realised financing was one of the farmers’ biggest challenges.

I mobilised other farmers into a group which is today putting up a cooling plant under the Inoi Milk Cooling and Value Addition Project with the help of the European Union.

What is your day-to-day job?

We connect our registered members to organisations that give non-refundable capital and capacity building for free. We help farmers to have their innovative ideas funded through training.

VIABLE IDEAS

Many people have very viable ideas that can work if financed but most of the available financiers demand conditions which many people cannot afford. From banks to micro-finance institutions, loans are prohibitive and inaccessible because many people do not have collateral.

Donor organisations should have come to their aid, but writing proposals that can secure funding is the impediment. We bridge that gap.
You secured funding of more than Sh6 million. How did you do it?

I didn’t get the money as an individual. But my group was awarded Sh6.7 million by the European Union for the proposal I did last year. I was rated the best community mobiliser out of the 11,000 applicants who did proposals. Only 124 proposals were funded, eventually.

In these workshops I realised there is a lot of money out there, but many needy people don’t know how to access it. But a warning to those who might think you can do anything with the money: If you do anything other than that intended, the donors will force you to refund every coin.

You charge individuals Sh50 and Sh100 for membership. Yet that is hardly enough to sustain a business. How else do you earn a living?
Mkulima Empowerment Foundation, as the name suggests, is not exactly a business. But, we officials and members, are business people.

We are farmers. I am a dairy farmer. The membership fee payable by phone as you can see in our website is just to facilitate our operations.

Being a member qualifies you to get our funded proposal as well as training on viable activities. Once you apply for funds using by filling in the form in our website, we visit you on the ground to access your farm. We have mainly been working with groups in the dairy industry, the most successful being the Inoi Farmers Processing Plant, which was funded by the European Union to a tune of Sh6.7 million.

There is also Kifaice Women Group and several home industry projects available in our website. Now we are opening it up because the more we are the more we can do.

What would you say the government does not do in agriculture that it ought to do?

Countries that are food secure have a keen interest in private enterprises that are doing commercial farming. We do not have enough incentives from the government.

We are yet to fully encourage young people that agri-business is a rich area to earn a living. The government should mobilise young people to engage in profitable agriculture because this will create very many jobs.