Founded in March 2005, Kenpride limited is company incorporated in Nairobi Kenya. The company was registered to provide capacity building in Agriculture sector specializing in Ethical and Fair Trade Practices, Environmental Management Systems and Food Safety and Quality Management Systems.
The company works to promote better understanding of these practices through provision of high quality but cost effective training, coaching and consultancy. The goal is to work with industry to implement Traceable, Sustainable Production, Social Compliance and Social Responsibility, Food safety & Quality Management practices.
While providing these services to the industry, Kenpride Limited realized that supply of good quality and quantities of sustainably produced Tea is hampered by unequal distribution of information, labor, other resources and benefits within the Tea farming families. Kenya is the world’s third largest tea producer and over 60% is produced by smallholders representing approximately 600,000 farmers. Majority of these farmers are women who do most of the production activities (about 70% of farm work) while men tend to benefit more from training in sustainable production practices as well as the income and other benefits derived from Tea and coffee sales. Kenpride limited has taken the next step and registered to be an exporter of tea with the intention to build meaningful connections between growers and consumers.
The company focuses on supply of sustainably produced, safe and quality Tea. The company has invested in building direct sourcing relationships with farmers. The next step to identify and link with buyers who are willing to create shared value in sustainable production chains.
Tea trade in Kenya is male dominated affair. We do know for a fact that further up in the value chain, women are disadvantaged. Although women may be petty traders and workers in processing plants, the number of women in trading or exporting companies is limited.
We at Kenpride have taken the odds to be amongst the few female commodity traders choosing to deal with direct trade rather than through the auctions. Our mission to encourage and promote women & men vendors to participate in international trade – leading by example.
We know who we work with, the smallholder producer groups and Hired Labor farms in Kenya producing Fairtrade and Organic Orthodox Tea. Together with these producer groups, we ensure that they put purpose and care into every significant process to produce traceable Specialty Tea. Specialty here is with reference to Fairtrade and Organic certification, Orthodox processing method Origin of the Tea which is at the slopes of Mt Kenya and highlands of Great Rift Valley.
Tea farming in Kenya is predominantly a man’s cash crop, which means he is the beneficiary of tea proceeds. The women, who in African culture is the man’s property, does majority of the work in tea farm- weeding, harvesting and delivering of the tea but proceeds goes to her husband. Our approach is to encourage gender fairness and inclusion in tea trade value chain.
Building on the principles of Fairtrade, Kenpride is committed to work with smallholder farmer groups and hired labor firms to empower and encourage women to participate in programs that will enable them to achieve meaningful and sustainable lives. These include such programs as technical support income generating activities through diversification, training in leadership, organizational governance, financial literacy and project management. Kenpride also work with the groups to identify gender-specific needs which hamper them from fully participating and engaging in meaningful productivity particularly issues relating to health safety and hygiene and together formulate possible solutions to address the identified needs.
The premiums accrued from trading these traceable high quality specialty (premium) tea is used to finance Gender-specific projects based on identified needs.