Entrepreneurship Zone: 02 September 2020: Kenyan serial entrepreneur now eyeing the camel milk industry

Wed Sep 2 06:37:54 CAT 2020

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Entrepreneurship Zone: 02 September 2020: Kenyan serial entrepreneur now
eyeing the camel milk industry

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 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.

Jeanette Clark talked to him about these two new ventures.

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.

Hassan Bashir

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.

Camels from Nourishing Nomads’ herd.

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.

The plant’s capacity will be 30,000 litres a day, but in the beginning we
will process around 3,000 litres per day. We want to grow this to 30,000
within five years. Wajir currently consumes only 15,000 litres of raw milk
per day, but through education and support of the upstream supply chain we
want to increase that over time to the levels we require.

You are also one of the co-founders of the social media influencer marketing
platform Wowzi. Tell us about this.

I was nearing the completion of my doctoral studies and started to think
about what I was going to do when I finish. My co-founders and I were
playing with different ideas, particularly looking at the businesses of the
future: the ideas that would be the in-thing five years down the line. The
digital economy became the focus. We brainstormed 10 ideas, narrowed it down
to three and then selected one. Brian and Mike, my co-founders and good
friends, were employed at other start-ups at the time, but I talked them out
of employment and into this venture. We then focused on developing Wowzi.

A lot of marketing budgets in Africa are still channelled towards
billboards, radio, TV and print newspapers. Yet the population in Africa is
fairly digital. These traditional methods of advertising also have a cost to
the environment and thus we were looking for a way to advertise cheaper,
faster and more cost effectively. Our studies showed that the social media
market was gaining traction in Africa. With 60% of Africa’s population under
the age of 19 years, we realised that we can formalise an industry by
creating an organised influencer marketing system and platform.

We fleshed out the idea in early 2019. By April or May we started developing
and the minimum viable product was ready in December 2019. At the beginning
of this year, we were doing beta testing and in March we were ready to go
live. Due to Covid-19 the launch has been pushed out and the team might
decide to do a digital launch eventually. Even though it has not officially
been launched, it has already created a buzz in the market and a serious
pipeline in Kenya.

Explain how it works.

The system lies in between the brand and the influencer. The influencer
accesses the system through the mobile app, while the brand accesses it
through a web portal. Any brand can go into the system and register an
account. Then you simply create a campaign, all without having to speak to
us at all. Once the campaign has been created, it matches your advertising
needs with the correct influencers on the system.

In Kenya we already have 10,000 influencers that are vetted. These
influencers have been ring-fenced and categorised by age, gender, geography
and by interest and product domain knowledge.

In the long run, this platform will sit between brands and the millions of
social media influencers across the continent.

How do influencers get paid?

The AI and algorithm look at whether you have delivered on the mandate and
goals of the campaign. If you deliver on the targets, your payment is
automatic through digital systems such as M-Pesa or Flutterwave.

How many social media followers must a person have to participate?

One of the powers of this system is that it creates employment for the youth
of Africa. Thus, nano influencers (someone with as few as 250 followers on
his or her social media account) are very important to us. Wowzi also works
with other categories of influencers such as micro, macro, and mega
influencers. This is a system that redistributes corporate budget back to
the community by activating thousands of influencers.

Consumers trust local influencers, the person who is known in the
neighbourhood, much more than celebrities. For example, a mother who says
that she has tried a specific milk and that it works for her family, is more
valuable than someone who has five million followers around the world but
has no specific authority over milk and how children are raised.

Some of our current clients include Nation Media Group, Nuella TV, Sky
Garden, Britam, Africa 24 Media, KEPSA, Ajira, Burn Manufacturing,
PendaHealth, Umoja Shoes, MyDawa, TibuHealth, GoK, Umma Insurance and Elimu
TV. Some of the big advertising agencies are also using Wowzi so that they
can achieve what they need to for their clients.

INVESTORS DIARY 2020

Company

Event

Venue

Date & Time

Companies under Cautionary

Bindura Nickel Corporation

Padenga Holdings

Delta Corporation

Meikles Limited

Invest Wisely!

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