Early in his career, Kenyan serial entrepreneur Hassan Bashir co-founded Zawaam Insurance Brokers and ICT company Soliton Telmec. Then he built the Islamic insurance firm Takaful Insurance of Africa (learn more about this venture in HOW WE MADE IT IN AFRICA: THE BOOK) before leaving in 2016 to focus on his doctoral degree. Last year, Bashir co-founded the influencer marketing platform Wowzi with Mike Otieno and Brian Mogeni. He also started developing the business plan for Nourishing Nomads, a company which will establish an entire value chain around camel milk in Kenya’s Wajir County, where Bashir grew up.
Tell us about Nourishing Nomads and how you developed the idea for this camel milk business.
It is a rural industrialisation idea and business plan that I have been working on and is located in northern Kenya in Wajir County, bordering Ethiopia and Somalia. Nourishing Nomads will process and commercialise camel milk. Many of the young people who are schooled in counties such as Wajir, which have been left behind by formal development in the last 55 years, look for a life in the big cities or elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, these underdeveloped and underserved counties end up being net losers – they educate these young people only to lose the human capital. I looked at that and realised that creating a production system that uses raw materials from the area itself will be the most feasible way to encourage the youth to stay and provide opportunities. Camel milk is such a raw material.
Our particular project is still in infancy. We have all the approvals in place and the civil engineer and his team have moved to the site. Construction will start in September and, hopefully, within six months we will have a processing plant with a capacity of 30,000 litres per day. We will use raw milk procured from pastoral herders, but we are also in the process of establishing a modern camel farm. This way we can avoid any interruptions in milk production during the dry season. We are hoping to influence upstream milk production through education and support to the pastoralist herders, to strengthen our supply chain.
Will you always procure raw milk from the pastoralist herders or will you eventually produce it yourself at the farm?
A large portion of the milk will be procured from pastoralist herding families. Even though we have the farm with our own herd of about 100 camels – a lot of them expecting and who will be productive soon – it does not mean that we will reach a point where we ever only rely on our own milk. The whole idea is to commercialise pastoralist milk and to turn that into commercial value for them, proving to herding families that they are actually sitting on gold. They could then produce milk, sell it to the processing plant and get a sustained income to improve their livelihoods.
Who is your target market for the camel milk?
We will first need to create standards in terms of the processing quality in order to take the product to the international market. So, initially, our market will definitely be Kenya. Our research shows that Wajir is able to produce 1.5 million litres of raw camel milk per day. This is only if all the herding families regard milk as something with commercial value. At the moment, herding families just milk what they need for drinking, perhaps a little bit extra. Therefore public education and farmer education is critical. If, one day, we have more supply than the local demand, specifically from Nairobi and Mombasa, then we will move to export.
The urbanised public in the big cities is starting to realise the value of camel milk. It is beneficial for lactose-intolerant consumers and has less cholesterol.
Africa has 86% of the world’s camel population. That is an amazing number, but no one seems to be aware of the value this holds. It is very important to bring that value to the market.
Would Nourishing Nomads get directly involved in the education of farmers and consumers around the product?
Yes, we will be involved directly. That is one of the company’s value adds in our vision to develop a nomadic dairy value chain in the Horn of Africa. There are a lot of health hazards in how the milk is currently handled, both at the farms and at the market. Our intention is to change that.
We will have an ultra-modern camel milk processing plant in Wajir. We will get milk from the producer families in an organised way, without any additives, and pay the families at their point of production. From there it will be transported via motorbike to chillers that are stationed in villages and then, via our logistics division, we will bring it to the Nourishing Nomads plant. Here we will add value by processing it into a diversified range of products. Then it goes back to the retail trader in what is mostly a women economy.
