Ian and Shelagh are Shared Interest ambassadors and the views in this post are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Shared Interest Society.

We arrived yesterday in Eldoret Western Kenya, after a very long but mostly uneventful bus ride, on the heels of a thunderstorm and resulting floods. We discovered today it was the first rain for six months and the staple maize crop is failing – the reality of climate change.

Today we visited Mace Foods, whose main product is dried chillis but who are looking to diversify into other dried vegetables. We were made very welcome by Job, Wilkins and Irene and after brief introductions put on white coats and hairnets to protect the chillis and face masks to protect us from them. The process is very simple – the chillis are air dried on trays then graded and sorted by hand.

After sharing lunch with the staff we were driven to visit 3 of the nearest farmers who grow the chillis as a cash crop in amongst maize and beans. A real highlight came at the third farm where Barnabas and his whole family from grandmother to children welcomed us into their home and gave us a cup of real Kenyan tea. As we drank it the heavens opened, the family said we were blessed visitors because we brought the rain!

Mace Foods work with 4000 farmers and unlike other buyers they pay cash on delivery – by mobile phone in many cases. They also train all their farmers not just in growing techniques, but also in basic profit and loss calculations. Shared Interest’s involvement enables all this to happen. Mace are also planning to buy a drier to process other vegetables with help from Shared Interest. It was wonderful to see an organisation which is running a business for profit but also helping so many families into profit too.

We have lots of great photos, but the local internet can’t cope with them. We’ll post some when we get home in 3 weeks time

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