Transmara Sugar Company is investing in new roads to access sugarcane from remote areas of Kenya and empower communities. We find out more…
The remote nature of the Trans Mara region presents challenges to local farmers looking to transport their produce and build thriving and sustainable businesses. Without well-built roads and infrastructure, moving large quantities of sugar cane is virtually impossible, meaning that farmers cannot develop their practices, improve their skills or make enough money to provide for themselves and the wider community.
At Transmara Sugar Company, road building is therefore an essential aspect of the business. By investing in new roads and maintaining existing routes, the company isn’t just able to access the raw product needed to create the high-quality sugar it sells throughout Kenya . It also helps to empower and raise up communities, boosting everybody’s prospects in the process.
“Transmara has been a key part of the community in terms of infrastructure,” says Frederick North-Coombes, CEO of Transmara Sugar Company. “We have been creating and maintaining roads of 300km per year in the region. This of course helps Transmara move sugar from the farm to the factory, but it also helps the farmers with other produce. It also helps the community to move within the region.”
Of the 300km of roads that North-Coombes refers to, up to 100km are new routes. These are created by widening existing cattle paths and carving out new roads to connect remote farms with a network of roads that then connect communities across the Trans Mara region.
Transmara’s Agriculture, Transport and Roads team uses murram, also known as laterite, to make compacted, safe roads, ensuring they are not prone to becoming muddy or slippery. It spends 100 million Kenyan Shillings ($750,000 USD) a year on its roads programme, investing heavily in the knowledge that as well as its own fleet of 150 tractors, other vehicles and people will be able to make use of them, whatever their needs, boosting economic development and protecting the health and wellbeing of its 17,000 farmers, 1500 employees and 3000 contractors in the process.
“Transmara is very helpful to the community because it has constructed many roads which we use, for example, to transport people to the hospital and for children to go to school,” says John Konongoi, a farmer in the Trans Mara region. “In the past, we didn’t have any good roads in the area. But now we have roads on hilltops that have been constructed by Transmara.”
Roads act as key arteries for the flow of life in this distant, beautiful part of Kenya. These simple routes have meant that Transmara Sugar Company has been able to grow since its founding in 2012 – today it processes 4000 tons of raw sugar cane a day, meaning it can produce 100,000 tons of sugar a year. Without the roads, local farmers could not flourish, businesses would not grow and everyone would be poorer as a result.
North-Coombes is conscious of the environmental impact that road building can have and is keen that Transmara Sugar Company puts back what it removes when making these new roads.
“As part of our sustainability programme we have a tree nursery to provide seedlings to schools and to the community to increase forest cover.” Squaring the economic needs of the community with the environmental impact of road building is vital. Transmara Sugar Company’s low-impact, sustainable approach proves it can be done.
