The KDSC Program is implemented through a range of activities grouped into three broad programmatic components.
- Component One: Enhancing Capacity for Milk and Production Input Quality Certification and Market Promotion
- Component Two: Developing Dairy Smallholder Business Organization
- Component Three: Increasing Availability of Dairy Business Development Services
Component One addresses constraints to competitiveness at the industry level, bringing together key stakeholders, from both the public and private sectors, to collaboratively craft and implement an industry action plan to address constraints to quality assurance and market promotion. Components Two and Three will facilitate market-based solutions while strengthening the capacity of support markets to address competitiveness constraints at the enterprise level, especially with dairy smallholder business organizations and processors.
All three components are supported through the KDSCP awards Program. This enables the use of local Kenyan expertise to facilitate innovative yet practical solutions to competitiveness constraints.
Progress in each of the three components will be tracked through a monitoring and evaluation plan that focuses on outcomes and impacts, in addition to outputs. A participatory process has been used to develop the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system, to ensure that industry stakeholders have a sense of ownership for the project's success.
Geographically, the KDSCP will be implemented in milk sheds that are of the greatest strategic business importance to processors, primarily, but not exclusively, in the Central and Rift Valley provinces of Kenya. These two provinces account for an estimated 80 percent of total milk production and about 75 percent of dairy smallholders.
Experience in Kenya indicates that women are often some of the most productive farmers and entrepreneurs in the dairy industry in Kenya. Building on this experience, the KDSC Program will take into account the varying roles, assets, knowledge and skills that men, women and youth bring to dairy farming and enterprise during program implementation. We will initiate this process, in collaboration with the USAID-funded Greater Access to Trade Expansion program. We will then propose and facilitate the implementation of opportunities for integrating youth and family members into dairy value-chain economic activities.
To mitigate against potential negative environmental impacts of program activities and ensure compliance with USAID regulations, we have completed revising the Environmental Examinations and Pesticide Evaluation Report and Safer Use Action Plans (PERSUAP). The KDSC Program will be implemented over a five year period.
The Business Development Services (BDS) MethodologyImplementation of the KDSC Program is based on innovative, international best practice approaches and methodologies that ensure achievement of expected results and sustainability of impacts long after the end of the program. Under the program, Land O' Lakes, Inc., the implementing agency, is facilitating market-based services/solutions, and supporting action-oriented policy research to overcome both industry-level and enterprise-level constraints to competitiveness at key points along the dairy value chain. Industry stakeholders have since been engaged to identify competitiveness constraints. The program will then employ market-based solutions by strengthening supporting markets for services and inputs provided by commercial service providers, industry associations and, to some extent, government service providers.
Utilizing a "light touch" approach, the program provides no direct technical assistance and training, other than capacity building to government regulatory agencies and will leverage resources to facilitate market-based solutions. The KDSC will also stimulate investment in research and dissemination of new market-based services, inputs, and technologies that will directly increase the competitiveness of dairy enterprises all along the value chain and ensure environmentally sustainable commercial dairy practices.
At the industry level, the KDSC will enable industry leaders, innovators and reformers to set competitiveness benchmarks and implement an industry-wide Action Plan that will harness national and international best practices, resources, and market-based solutions to overcome constraints to industry competitiveness. At the enterprise level, the program will facilitate commercial linkages between processors, Smallholder Business Organizations (SBO), and commercial input and service providers to build robust, sustainable partnerships and to achieve economies of scale and upgrade milk quality to meet national and international standards in high-potential milk-sheds.
