WDI Studying Impacts For Kenya Enterprise
WDI has been engaged by Sidai Africa Ltd., a livestock franchise social enterprise, to guide them in their impact assessment efforts. This includes identifying potential impacts across key stakeholders, providing recommendations for business model enhancement, and developing a process Sidai can use to quantify these impacts.
Founded in early 2011, Sidai has a goal to establish and support a franchised network of 150 outlets in Kenya that provide quality animal husbandry and health goods and services to farmers and pastoralists. Once established, Sidai outlets will together support 300,000 livestock-keeping households in Kenya, significantly improving their welfare and incomes by providing access to affordable quality livestock husbandry and health products and services.
As part of this engagement, WDI BoP Research Associate Heather Esper spent two weeks in Kenya working closely with Sidai to develop a strategic analysis of their local impacts. She identified and interpreted a set of potential positive and negative impacts of Sidai’s work, using WDI’s BoP Impact Assessment Framework. She accomplished this by spending considerable time in the field where she was able to verify and enrich the findings with qualitative data collected through formal and informal interviews with key stakeholders and end beneficiaries. She conducted interviews with pastoralists, dairy farmers, agrovets (small shops selling livestock and farm inputs), dairy cooperatives, non-profits, professional organizations, and government officials.
Esper said her time in Kenya was very productive.
“I was able to meet with a wide range of stakeholders across the different areas Sidai hopes to open their first franchisees in,” she said. “It was particularly helpful to spend time in both semi-arid to arid areas where the livestock sector faces many challenges, as well as more prosperous areas where the dairy industry is strong in order to understand the different impacts Sidai will have in these different environments.”
After returning to Ann Arbor, Esper consulted with the rest of the BoP team regarding her findings. The team will debrief the Sidai leadership on their findings and recommendations at the end of August - which included insights on how Sidai can heighten its positive impacts and mitigate its negative impacts in order to enhance their business model. Esper also is currently developing a set of recommendations for Sidai, which will describe a set of options for collecting data on the impacts identified in the strategic analysis.
