From Karen to Ol Joro Orok: The making of a bold entrepreneur

Why should someone leave the prestigious Karen in Nairobi and relocate to the rural areas when everyone is complaining about rural-urban migration? I wanted to find out over the weekend.  

Ol Joro Orok is a small town located between Ol Kalou, the headquarters of Nyandarua County, and Nyahururu (formerly known as Thomson Falls). Its most important landmark is an old post office, which is now a church. A signboard nearby shows the direction to Dundori, along with its myths, like checking the gender of a car.

Locals call the small town Njororoko. Just past this town, the home of the British settlers like Edmund Pierce and Hugh Burtt, turn right and follow the signboard to Eldoville Dairy. In about five kilometres on an unpaved road, you get to the factory that neighbours Primarosa, the flower growers and their greenhouses.

The dairy is a big building with a greenish roof. The firm’s Chairman, James Karuga, waited for me. I have taken Eldoville yoghurt, but I did not know it was produced in Nyandarua, the mountainous county, forgotten by man but remembered by God.

Beyond the tour of the factory, from milk intake to its processing and value addition into yoghurt, ice cream and cheese, an adjacent building prepares vegetables and potato cubes.

The airline industry and schools are some of the customers. This factory, built in 2016, has a fascinating story, a lesson for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

It was started in Karen (Remember Karen Blixen?) before relocating to Njororoko. Karuga and his wife started with one Jersey and Guernsey cow sold to them by a neighbour during the 1984 drought. It cost Sh3,000.  Later, they added six more cows bought from Nightingale Farm in Njoro.

They finally had 55 grade cows and employed 120 citizens. Karen was a farming community before real estate took over. I wish it had remained so!

Why would a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economics graduate, taught by Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson become a dairy farmer?  Karuga   once worked with the UN Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva.

Over the weekend, with his wife they would drive across France and Switzerland. The Swiss dairy farms fascinated them. They were not large, but profitable. That’s how they got inspired to start farming. Back in Kenya in the late 1970s, they actualised the dream by buying the small farm in Karen. Having grown up in the countryside, near Eldoret (hence Eldoville) might also have been an incentive.

Karuga’s boldest move was leaving the leafy suburb for Nyandarua, near Lake Ol Bollosat and its hippos. He sold his Karen farm and got the seed money for the new dairy in addition to paying off his debts.

He now employs 20 workers, far from 120. But his dream is to employ more. And there is potential, he noted, “Only 20 per cent of Kenyan milk is processed compared with South Africa’s 80 per cent.”

Getting credit has been his soft underbelly. Yet he needs that to expand, create more jobs and contribute to Kenya’s gross domestic product. The local community is feeling Eldoville, which buys milk at a better price than competitors. Unlike Karen, Karuga does not keep dairy cattle; he outsources milk. His products include premium dairy products like artisan cheese, fresh vegetables, ready-to-cook meals, refreshing juices, and Crispy Snacks.

He had also been a victim of fraud, with a foreign firm failing to deliver machines despite being paid.  Uchumi and Nakumatt still owe him money. Despite this, the old boy of Alliance High School seems to have just started his entrepreneurial life!

Karuga is going back to the basics. The Britons who made this county their home had a vibrant dairy industry with a KCC at Nyahururu.

His competitive edge is quality, with HACCP and ISO 22000 certification, value addition, and focus on niche markets. Add boldness, like shifting from Karen to Njororoko- just like the Britons left England for Kenya’s white highlands, where his dairy is now located.

He is almost done with a deal to get a strategic investor. That will expand Eldoville, create more jobs and cement his legacy as a pioneer industrialist. A few more factories like that, and Nyandarua will shift from an agrarian to an industrial age.

One wishes the government (both national and county) supported our industrialists and investors like other governments in China, Korea and other countries. Interestingly, five Heads of State have visited his Karen farm.

What if the counties reversed the brain drain from rural to urban areas? Karuga, in addition to Alliance, MIT and Sussex, also went to Oxford. We need more such bold entrepreneurs.

After a lunch at his upcoming log cabin, he gave me some yogurt which I sampled at home. You should try it too.

On the long drive back to Nairobi, I reflected on the economic future of the countryside. Devolution was to be the catalyst for county economic growth. We seem to have forgotten that the key catalyst in this economic transformation is bold entrepreneurs like Karuga.

How do you bring more like him from the leafy suburbs of Nairobi and other cities to the countryside? Next week, how to reverse brain drain from the countryside.