Vipani

Finally I am going to write something about my internship with Vipani.

Before I met with TG, founder and managing director of Vipani, I thought the organization is a combination of micro-finance and consulting for farmers - they help farmers secure funding, access to premium markets, and advise them on farming techniques. It's not wrong at all, but after a couple of conversation with TG, I found out that Vipani is more than that. Vipani is a grass-root nonprofit incorporated in California, with a vision to create an agriculture marketplace where poor farmers could be enabled to participate in free trade with suppliers, buyers, lenders, farming experts, etc. Of course, there are many other ways to define Vipani. According to my GSB classmate, Ziad Mokhtar who are working with me on the same GMIX internship, Vipani is "an Indian social entrepreneurship funded by US philanthropists to help Kenyan famers with the assitance of a Chinese and an Egyptian."

Ziad and I had slightly different tasks. My assignment is to develop an operations manual for the unit and central office management, while Ziad is required to set up an accounting/MIS system for the operation. In the first week, we discovered that there is probably no easy way to set up a system that captures all the requirements and the accounting software the company had purchased couldn't handle all the accounting requirements. As a result, our tasks have been changed a little bit – we are both working on creating a filing/tracking system for the unit operations. We re-designed the unit operating processes and now are piloting the manual filing system with unit managers. It's a more interesting job for me – obviously writing a manual is no fun.

TG, our boss for the GMIX program, is a Stanford visiting scholar. TG is originally from India, opinionated, animated, and extremely talkative. He has been doing NGO stuff for almost all his career and is very passionate about what Vipani is doing.

We have gone on several field trips so far. It's been interesting to see how the largest industry in Kenya in real life. These farming areas are not far from Nairobi city – 40-60 km. For me, people here are living lives not very different from those in poorest mountainous area in China – except that their black skin makes it look worse. Most kids on the street are running barefooted. Some adults are idling around the corner. On every junction that leads to villages, there are many people carrying fruits and vegetables trying to sell to the drivers or people passing by.

On one of the trips, Ziad and I made an adventure by taking matatu (local mini bus) from one village to another. This was quite adventurous because these matatus are often over-loaded and crashes/accidents that killed all the passengers are reported every now and then.

Jeff Buenrostro, another GSB classmate who worked with Vipani on a Stanford project, will pass by Nairobi tomorrow. We are taking him to a field trip.

Vipani farmers are harvesting french beans

Ziad, Shu, and a farmer family; We are with a group of local kids, Elisabeth (unit manager) and Michael (farming expert) I thought the finger that accidentally appeared in the picture was cute

Saba Saba village - a group of curious kids are peeping us - while I had gone from the other side of the building and caught them right there.

A "grocery store" in Saba Saba - opened by a successful Vipani farmer