SOYKIT FOR BETTER NUTRITION AND INCOMES IN WESTERN KENYA

The ability of women to operate as food entrepreneurs presents opportunities to leverage at-home production technologies to not only support family nutrition but also generate income. 2SCALE project which works towards incubating and accelerating inclusive agribusiness in Africa has incorporated a soy kit in its intervention approach among the partners they are working with to make this dream come true.

Soy-kit is a simple set of 17 different pieces of equipment mainly used in grinding various grains more so soybeans for value addition at the cottage level. The kit can be manually or automatically operated to grind 10-15 kgs of soybean that can be processed into 30-40 liters of soybean milk or yogurt daily.

25 women-led groups acquired 25 soy kit equipment to enable them to undertake value addition and enhance nutritional and economic resilience. Value addition increased the competitiveness of Soya leading to improved markets and thus increased incomes for these women groups. The women managed to process and sell an average of 20 liters of soymilk and yogurt from an average cost of Kes.70 for a kg of raw soybeans to an average of Kes.300 for an equivalent capacity of soy milk leading to a total income of Kes 6000 Daily. This call for the need to replicate these gains to other the other 3000 Soya beans farmers