Tag: Kenya

Quail farming: The new ‘side hustle’ in Kenya

While Kenyans went about their daily lives, a flock of birds, hidden in plain view, fluttered onto our dinner plates and captured a nation’s imagination.

Social media pundits describe them as a pyramid scheme. Skeptics sneer at this idea. Locals in the markets, at chama meetings and around their dinner tables never tire of discussing them. You see, these little wild things are at the epicentre of a health revolution in this nyama choma country. They should be. We Kenyans take ourselves too seriously and build too many castles in the air to notice nature’s solutions all around us. This time it has come in the form of a bird the size of a small fist.

A helping of two quail eggs a day is said to be the answer to multiple problems. One of its benefits is a rather well-known secret on the streets. Every witchdoctor’s cut-and-paste poster that hug school walls, lamp posts and every nook available, emphasises an endemic problem. “We cure male weaknesses!” is their tagline. Well, a simple quail’s egg is said to improve blood circulation as it strengthens the heart muscles, increasing the male libido and stamina. Packed with protein and low in carbohydrates and fat, a quail egg is not only considered a superfood, but an aphrodisiac too. Don’t overdo it though. A poor chap from Nairobi’s Komarock suburb gulped – on a friend’s advice – 30 raw quail eggs during a sleep-over at his girlfriend’s house. He woke up on the other side of town where people rest in peace.

The nutritional value of quail eggs is said to be about three times higher than that of chicken eggs. (Pic: Flickr / ilya)

Like everyone else, we dread poverty and aspire to the good life. We have to. The ugly face of poverty tends to relentlessly peep into our living room windows, its ugly grin announcing the fate that awaits anyone who slips. From local politicians, office workers, informal workers, public administrators, and even the jobless, every Kenyan is a hustler. The broke sod in the pub has to run errands, wash cars and wipe tables to earn just a cigarette or drinks.

Now quail farming is the new side hustle. It has attracted thousands of would-be entrepreneurs who have been bitten by the famous ‘wildebeest migration’ bug. Here’s how it works: One person tells his friends that his half-acre strawberry farm brings in a million bob every three months. The next thing you know, his friends have taken up strawberry farming and it becomes the in thing.

A quail farmer was featured in the local newspaper last year. His quail business was minting a fortune and incurring negligible expenses. You see, a quail bird is low-maintenance: it gobbles 20 grams of feed a day, unlike a chicken that consumes 120 grams. Within a few weeks, there were small banners on shop fronts, walls, and, street light pillars proclaiming the magical powers of this brown-freckled bird. Enterprising Kenyans quickly did their research and sent off their applications to the Kenya Wildlife Service to become… quail farmers.

Quail farming is a million-shilling business with the promise of boosting many incomes in a country where the masses are constantly chasing the elusive shilling. To qualify to be a quail farmer, one completes an application form from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), a government agency in charge of the country’s wildlife. Their officers then come around to inspect the cages for housing the birds. They need to be kept in a warm and dry place in well-ventilated cages that are far from modern pollutants. After their applications have been approved, farmers pay a fee of R150. Permit holders are also subject to impromptu inspections and any violations of the permit’s conditions can result in the licence being revoked. Last year the government handed out more than 5 000 licences, and thousands more are still pending.

The opportunities are boundless if one can capture the still young Kenyan market. However, KWS say the market is becoming saturated, so many farmers are now eyeing the more lucrative Chinese market. There are over 172 000 Google search results about quails from Kenya. The quail farming business has also taken off online – you can now purchase chicks or eggs from a number of sources.

In December 2013, a single tiny quail egg was retailing at slightly more than a dollar in Kenya. Considering a chicken egg costs 8 US cents, quail farmers were making a killing. A day-old quail chick was retailing at an average of R45. The problem with the wildebeest migration bug is that now the lucrative quail market is flooded by too many entrepreneurs and we are experiencing a glut. Like a gift from the skies, now the common man can enjoy the benefits of this bird which was previously only affordable to the middle class. Now, you can purchase a day-old chick for R15 while a quail egg costs between R2 and R3.

The gist of the matter is that this quail business is not only about money. As any health and nutrition buff will tell you, natural food is best! Lately our country is experiencing a surge in lifestyle diseases as western corporates scramble to satiate our rising appetite for junk food. The rich AND poor are dying in droves from cancer, diabetes, hypertension and heart-related ailments. Our government has actually banned the importing and selling of GMO food products.

The reality is that cheap processed food is available everywhere, and is easier on the pocket, but the Kenyan middle-class is awakening to the fact that money is not true wealth, health is. Going green and eating healthy is the new rave. And consuming quail meat and eggs promises a plethora of health benefits. It’s said to be a detoxifying agent, an immune booster and stress reliever. It helps with digestive tract disorders, stomach ulcers, anemia, tuberculosis, heart problems, bronchial illnesses and diabetes. It can alleviate migraines and give you healthier hair, while keeping hypertension, digestive disturbance, gastric ulcer, liver problems and blood pressure under control. A quail egg a day may indeed keep the doctor away.

With all these ‘super natural’ powers, I suggest government should fund two quail eggs a day for each child in public school instead of wrestling with a costly laptop project that’s way beyond their depth. The quail phenomenon is a healthy socio-political, economic, and spiritual answer to Kenyans’ problems. Right now, I’m off to have my own dish of fried aluru (quail) accompanied by wild vegetable herbs and brown ugali (a cake made from corn).

Munene Kilongi is a freelance writer and videographer based in Nairobi.

10 years ago

Rare white rhino dies in Kenya, pushing breed close to extinction

A picture taken on October 2004 shows a northern white rhinoceros named Fatu (C) at the Dvur Kralove zoo, east Bohemia. (Pic: AFP)

One of the last northern white rhinos on the planet has died in a reserve in Kenya, leaving the sub-species on the verge of extinction, experts said on Saturday.

The male, called Suni, “was probably the last male capable of breeding”, according to Dvur Kralove zoo in the Czech Republic, where the rhino was born in 1980.

There are only six of the very rare rhinos left, having been hunted by poachers in central and east Africa for their horns, which are highly prized for traditional Chinese medicine.

The Czech zoo is the only one in the world to have succeeded in breeding the sub-species in captivity.

Suni – who is thought to have died from natural causes in the Ol Pejeta reserve – was one of two males and two females from Dvur Kralove zoo reintroduced into the wild in Kenya in 2009, in an operation dubbed “the last chance of survival”.

It was hoped that the females’ hormones would normalise in the wild, but even attempts at assisted conception failed.

“One can always believe in miracles but everything leads us to believe that hope they would reproduce naturally has gone,” the zoo’s spokesperson Jana Mysliveckova told AFP.

Sperm from the males born at Dvur Kralove has been conserved at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin.

Another pair of the rhinos, too old to reproduce, live at the Wild Animal Park in San Diego in the United States, with another aged female remaining at Dvur Kralove, close to the border with Poland.

“The number of rhinos killed by poachers has increased incredibly in the past few years,” Mysliveckova said. “According to some scenarios, there will be no rhinos left in the wild in Africa in 10 years or so.”

10 years ago

Kenya: Putting an end to transactional sex and letting girls be girls

It was a Facebook message from Liz Moran at the Women’s Institute of Secondary Education and Research (Wiser) that prompted me to research and write this article.

Part of it read: “Many girls engage in transactional sex in order to pay school fees or buy sanitary pads resulting in some of the highest HIV rates in the country (38%). The barriers for female education are so strong that in 30 years, only one woman from the community had attended University.”

This is happening in Muhuru Bay, a town in the Nyanza Province of Kenya. It is situated on the banks of Lake Victoria, close to the Tanzanian border.

The facts haunted me. Young girls engage in sex with fishermen in order to pay for school fees or sanitary towels. And it gets worse: women fishmongers in the fishing communities commonly form relationships with fishermen to secure the rights to purchase the fish they catch and then sell them in the market. The sex exchange typically occurs in a hurried manner, often without preparation or protection. As it compromises their ability to practise safer sex, men and women in these fishing communities are at increased risk of HIV.

Given the nomadic nature of the fishing community here and a lack of education about HIV and Aids, it is thus not surprising that out of at least every ten people, about four of them are HIV positive. Recent figures from the Kenya National HIV and Aids Estimates say that Kenya has the fourth highest HIV prevalence in the world, with about 1.6 million people infected with the virus. Of these, an estimated 191 840 are children.

In the larger Lake Victoria region, it is also common for women and girls to have sex with fishermen to obtain food, or to get fish to sell in order to pay for medicine or school fees. Therefore, it is necessary to break this cycle by offering a solution to at least one of the challenges.

Wiser seems to have found a good one.

“We run an entirely free high school for girls in Muhuru Bay, a fishing village in rural Kenya,” Moran told me. “Girls here rarely complete secondary school. They are forced into marriages, become pregnant, drop out of school to enable their brothers to continue, suffer physical and psychological abuse, and have a general lack of support and positive female role models.”

Students at Wiser. (Pic: Supplied)

In 2006, Dr Sherryl Broverman, co-founder of Wiser, discovered a note that was slipped under her door while she was in Muhuru Bay doing research. “Should I stop having sex with the man who is paying my school fees? I am afraid of getting Aids,” it read. The note was from a 14-year-old girl.

In 2007, Wiser was formed to empower young girls in Muhuru Bay through education. Here girls would be offered a chance to study for free as well as get hands-on skills in agriculture, reproductive health and engineering. The girls would be removed from the environment that predisposed them to health risks, lack of education and instead get a chance to be girls.

The Wiser school in Muhuru Bay provides clothes, sanitary pads, books, healthy food, supportive teachers, mosquito nets, and medicine. About 150 girls have gone through the school, and girls who are pregnant are also welcomed. The school offers counselling and psychosocial support for its students while also helping them realise their talents and leadership skills. According to Wiser and Kenya’s Ministry of Health, this region has the highest HIV, malaria and infant mortality rates in the country.

“Our maiden class graduated this year in March and all the 28 girls passed their final Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education and 17 have qualified for university,” said Moran. “We know that those are girls who will lead their families and communities. They are innovative – some are making solar powered items from recycled materials.”

Members of Wiser’s Engineering Club. The girls have created flashlights with locally available materials which they hope to franchise. (Pic: Supplied)

Evidently, Wiser has long been living up to this year’s International Day of the Girl Child theme, ‘Empowering Adolescent Girls: Ending the Cycle of Violence’. By creating a fee-free secondary school, the organisation is changing the notion of what is possible for girls in Muhuru Bay, and also ending the vicious cycle of transactional sex and gender-based violence in school.

“Before coming to Wiser, the girls were in schools where their teachers touched them inappropriately and others were raped. Due to this, some dropped out. Here, we take a deliberate initiative to protect the girls while in school and we minimise their time out of school as well,” Moran said.

Girls around the world still face discrimination simply because they are girls. As we mark International Day of the Girl Child on October 11, the reality is that there are those who may still have to trade their bodies for a pen, a book or a sanitary pad. Fortunately for the girls in Muhuru Bay, they have one less challenge to overcome. Their education is being catered for and they are gradually being empowered to make their own informed decisions.

Hopefully when the UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka marks the day at Unicef, she will challenge each and every one of us to empower our adolescent sisters. We may have resources that we can share to educate them. We may mentor them, we may share our experiences with them, so they could learn from us and us from them.

There is a need for a generation of young girls who are actively involved in their well-being and who are proactively taking steps to end the cycle of violence and inequality. And then, they need to carry it forward to those who come after them.

It is my hope that young girls across Africa will stop exchanging sex for any basic commodities, not merely because of the risk of HIV and Aids or pregnancy, but because they do not have to.

Eunice Kilonzo is a journalist in Kenya.

10 years ago

Lessons from the Kenyan classroom

Children play at the sprawling Mathare slums, one of the largest and poorest in Africa, near Kenya’s capital Nairobi. (Pic: Reuters)

On a recent Thursday at around midday, I saw a group of kids, not more than 15, who by their size appeared to be in nursery school.

The little boys and girls in pink checked shirts and grey pair of shorts were clustered in front of televisions on display.

They were pointing at a monkey swinging on the screens. They sighed in awe when they saw the close-up shots of ants. Around them were aisles after aisles full of new products for sale.

When I saw them, I thought: “Wow, these kids are out shopping at this hour … shouldn’t they be in class?”

However, unknown to me they were in class. Their teacher had brought her class on a trip to a SUPERMARKET.

Let that sink in.

A supermarket.

That one place that we dash into quickly to get a few things was their location for an educational trip.

Their teacher enthusiastically showed them why the many TVs in different sizes were on the shelves and why they had price tags on them. And that was not all; she was also describing to these young children why certain aisles were labelled the way they were.

Soap.

Body lotion.

Glass.

Again, a trip to a supermarket.

It stood out for me because school excursions during my primary school days were always out of town, probably to a beach or an agricultural institution or to the zoo or the airport – what I would now consider ‘educational’. A supermarket, in my view, was the least educational place for any learner.

But I was wrong.

From the looks of things and by the teacher’s thorough explanation of what happened here, you could tell this was an important trip.

The supermarket is in Mathare North. Mathare in Kenya is an area known for slums (second to Kibera), violence and more slums. In fact a quick search on Google shows you that the extent of poverty here is on another level.

Indeed it is true. I know, I live here.

The area has informal settlements popping up all over. Every few hundred metres you are bound to find a burst sewer that flows into water pipes, and food vendors. You will see clinics and health centres competing for space with bars and entertainment joints. You will see stalls lined up, trying to attract potential customers with their music, sales pitches or adverts.

There are car washes, colourful matatus (public taxis) and happy children playing on the road side. There are high-rise houses so close to each other that if one tenant has a cold, the neighbour next door would probably pick it up. That close. There are electricity wires in meshes swaying and scrapping the air in the Mathare skies.

Each day as I get into a matatu to town, I pass school children who, despite their torn socks and faded uniforms, carry paper bags full of books as they head to class. I see little boys and girls bracing the morning chill to get to school.

It was only when l I bumped into the class on this trip that I realised their lessons were both in and out of the classrooms.

I deduced that their teacher wanted to show them the available possibilities amidst the sea of poverty they knew. There was such a high level of want that these young minds would look forward to attending class the next day, pegged on the possibility of stepping into a supermarket that they either passed by every morning or whose branded paper bags they saw on the streets.

Seeing these inquisitive children asking why the soaps were put away from the bread and maize flour made me realise that while this visit to the supermarket was ordinary to me, it was probably a first for these little leaders.

You could see the admiration in their eyes as shoppers carried items passed them. It hit me that this trip was the opening of new chapters in these children’s lives. That beyond the mire of life in a slum town as they know it, there was so much more available. So much variety was presented to these kids but circumstances had hindered them from reaching out to them.

I saw this and I was challenged to take a fresher look at the things I have and assume exist for everyone else.

Later, the children filed past the teller and each was given a lollipop on their way out. Some of them began to undo the lollipop wrappers in glee. Then I noticed one who looked at his sweet for a while and then simply put it into his shirt pocket, stretched out his palm and joined his hand to complete a chain of little hands and glossy excited eyes.

Once their lesson for the day was over, they streamed out with their teacher.

Eunice Kilonzo is a print journalist and storyteller who tells tales on development, feminism and health. Connect with her on Twitter: @Eunicekkilonzo

10 years ago

Kenya offers fully-paid holiday to US teenager mistaken for ‘white widow’

A ‘Red Notice’ for the arrest of Samantha Lewthwaite issued by Interpol in September 2013. (Pic: Getty)

Kenya’s government has offered an all-expenses-paid holiday in Kenya to a 15-year-old American teenager and her family after police mistook her for Samantha Lewthwaite, the British terrorist suspect nicknamed the “white widow”.

The teenager was “harassed by police in Mlolongo”, outside the capital Nairobi, “on accusations of looking like” Lewthwaite, the government said.

Joseph Ole Lenku, Kenya’s interior minister, announced that “the government will sponsor a fully-paid holiday for the family” to make up for the incident and that police were also investigating.

Lewthwaite was married to Germaine Lindsay, one of four Islamist suicide bombers who attacked the London transport network on 7 July 2005, killing 52 people.

The 30-year-old Muslim convert has been linked to Somalia’s al-Shabab rebels, who have launched a string of attacks in Kenya including the assault on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping centre that claimed at least 67 lives a year ago on Sunday.

There has been no confirmed sighting of Lewthwaite since she gave Kenyan police the slip in Mombasa in 2011, reportedly using a false South African passport. Last month Kenyan detectives hunting her said the trail had gone cold.

She is wanted in Kenya on charges of being in possession of explosives and conspiracy to commit a felony dating back to December 2011, and is the subject of an Interpol “red notice” warrant for her detention issued at Kenya’s request.

David Smith for the Guardian