Digital Traceability and Quality Upgrading in the Dairy Value Chain in Kenya

Finding the right partners and places to ask questions is paramount to understanding the drivers of agricultural transformation. To facilitate opportunities for researchers and partners to develop trust and scope early-stage evaluation questions, DAISI funds small proposal development grants to support very preliminary, exploratory research activities, including researcher travel. This proposal development grant explored research themes related to information (milk quality) and access to credit under the cross-cutting theme of resource use and climate resilience.

This proposal development grant aimed to explore digital traceability along the Kenyan dairy cooperative value chain as a strategy to address product quality challenges and reward upstream producers for better milk quality. The researcher assessed whether a sustainable digital milk traceability system could be developed and which prediction models would be effective in revealing individual farmers’ milk quality.

The results showed that farmers who received model-based quality feedback reduced water adulteration in their milk by 21.9 percent, nearly double the reduction seen with random testing, while also increasing their access to credit for animal feed, as cooperatives viewed consistently high-quality producers as more trustworthy. Although there were no significant improvements in butterfat or bacteria levels on average, the share of farmers failing minimum butterfat standards decreased, and cooperatives began offering targeted training and higher credit limits to top performers. The approach proved more cost-effective and scalable than conventional methods, suggesting strong potential for wider adoption as Kenya moves toward quality-based milk payment policies. Read the working paper here.