In 2002, the frustrations associated with finding a
good egg incubator to hatch chickens to sell and
sustain his fledgling poultry business, drove
Geoffrey Kago to invent one. So with around $6 he
built one incubator, which marked the starting
point of a poultry enterprise worth over $100,000
today.
It has been quite a journey for the soft-spoken man
who receives 50 to 100 calls daily from Kenyans in
various regions interested in his signature innovation
called the Kaki Incubator. The incubator is named
after his company Kaki Village Enterprise. It’s one of
the most popular of his innovations, which also
include egg candlers (lights used to observe the
growth and development of an embryo inside an
egg). “Sales this year have gone up by 50%,” says
Kago.
At the time of conceptualising his incubator, Kago
noticed that most of the incubators in the market
were designed for large scale hatcheries and
unaffordable for smallholder farmers.
Besides making electric incubators, Kago has also
developed kerosene powered units. For regions where
there is abundant sunlight, he converts the
incubators to tap into solar energy. The company is
currently also in the process of developing incubators
that can run on biodiesel, sourced from cotton,
croton and castor seeds. In Kenya’s Mai Mahiu area,
where there are 3,000 internally displaced persons
(IDPs) due to the 2007 Kenyan post-election violence,
Kago is providing them with castor seeds to plant on
their small plots of land and in the neighbouring
forest. He aims to be buying the castor seeds in the
near future and provide IDPs with a source of
income.
Loving the “sense of independence”
Growing up close to the rural Kenyan town of Nyeri,
where his parents reared indigenous chickens, got
Kago interested in poultry from a young age. In 1985,
he bought his first chicken from his mother for
$0.20. He was able to tend to it well and bred 200
chicks. From selling these chicks, Kago paid his high
school fees from Form 2 to Form 4 at Nyeri High
School.
“I loved the sense of independence,” he says. It was
also in high school that the incubator innovation
idea began budding, having experienced the
challenges of traditional hatching with a mother
chicken. An event which also spurred him to innovate
was when a neighbour poisoned his chicken. The
scaled-down versions of electric incubators he
developed won him several prizes at high school
science congresses.
To make ends meet after high school, Kago’s life took
a different trajectory, almost drawing him away from
his passion for poultry. In 1997, he went to Nairobi
and settled in the Kiserian area. To survive, he
worked as a stone mason and casual labourer. Later
on he got work as an apprentice carpenter for two
years in a funeral home where he learnt joinery. He
got so skilled he could make pool tables.
The skills he learned from the funeral home proved
priceless. He was able to join the dots when
designing a viable working electric incubator in 2002.
He bought the fittings needed for the incubator with
$6 he saved from hawking cigarettes, his last job
before re-entering the poultry business.
Today Kaki Village Enterprise is regularly courted by
Kenyan government ministries and international
NGOs, interested in the company’s technologies for
farmer groups.
For Kago, his journey has not been without
challenges. He is of the opinion that Kenyans are yet
to appreciate local technology as the solution to
boost industrialisation. He also says that banks make
it difficult for small entrepreneurs to access credit
facilities.
Kaki Village Enterprise currently has three branches
in various parts of Kenya. At the age of 36, Kago is
full of ambition and aims to start a unique poultry
cooperative in the future. He is also a keen admirer
of the Apple founder Steve Jobs.
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