The Eastern and Southern Africa Dairy Association (ESADA) held a dairy exhibition at The Kenyatta International Convention Center (KICC), from August 22 to August 24, 2018. The exhibition brought together over 100 exhibitors in the dairy sector, from different countries all over Africa, consumers of their different products and services and farmers involved in dairy farming. The exhibition was open to the general public and it ran from 8.00 am to 6.00 pm, East African time.
Background information
ESADA is a non-political membership organization. Established in 2004, ESADA is the premier dairy association in Africa with an overall mandate of increasing trade in African dairy products.
The African Dairy Conference and Exhibition is the hallmark of the ESADA activities. The event held annually is an opportunity for players within and outside the dairy sector to showcase their products to consumers and other decision makers, create new markets, orient the consumers to their new innovative products, meet and share knowledge with other players.
Aims of the Exhibition
The African Dairy Conference and Exhibition which is held annually was started with the following aims;
- To enable the consumers, discover new technological trends and developments in the food industry
- For exhibitors to show case their innovative milk processing equipment
- Enable exhibitors to meet their existing customers at a personal level
- To provide a platform for exhibitors to exclusively launch their latest or newest products in the dairy industry.
A Visit to the processing farms
Other than just exhibiting in the exhibition hall, the exhibitors, farmers and consumers had an opportunity to visit different dairy farms and different milk processing plants. This made them have a clear picture of the processes that milk goes through, before they have the end products like Yoghurt, cheese and butter.
World Animal Protection’s role in the exhibition
World Animal Protection, being an animal welfare organization was present at the exhibition. They played a major role in helping farmers understand what animal welfare entails and how they can rear their dairy animals in good welfare in order to make the animal happy, and in the long run, increase productivity and quality in terms of milk production. World Animal Protection has also been a great partner to ESADA in managing such events in the dairy sector.
In the exhibition, we managed to gather a great supporter base, with over 2000 people agreeing to support our work in protection of animals., by signing up on our data sheet. We hope to keep engaging them in our journey to protect animals and make them endeavor to support our work.
In conclusion, the dairy sector is the fastest growing agricultural sub sector which generates great economic returns and employment, hence there is need for the dairy animals to be well taken care of.
