Livestock has long been the primary livelihood for the pastoralist communities of Southern Sudan. Despite this, as recently as two years ago, the milk produced by the pastoralists’ herds was neither collected nor marketed in Kapoeta, a remote town in the Eastern Equatoria State of Southern Sudan. When
Land O’Lakes International Development arrived on the scene to set up its Livestock Development and Dairy Cooperatives Program (LDDCP), one of its first activities was to establish a cooperative that would allow the people of Kapoeta to take advantage of the potential income-earning opportunity in selling their milk.

Through program funding provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Land O’Lakes assisted the seminomadic people of Kapoeta’s Toposa community to establish the Riwoto Livestock Cooperative Society (RILICOS). The main activities of RILICOS are marketing livestock, milk and milk products. The first cooperative ever formed by Southern Sudan’s pastoralists, RILICOS is also the first organization in Eastern Equatoria State to market dairy products.

Before it set up RILICOS, Land O’Lakes held many discussions with the local Toposa community to establish a relationship built on trust and cooperation. Because the Toposa community has been isolated for many years due to Sudan’s long civil war, it was clear from the beginning that the success of the cooperative would be dependent on close consultation with the community’s chiefs and elders.

Ensuring that women were well-represented in the cooperative was also an important focus. While men are the primary decision-makers in pastoralist systems, owning most of the livestock and maintain responsibility for herding, herd management, and the sale of live animals, women also have responsibility for livestock-related activities, such as managing sick and young cattle, milking cows and watering smaller livestock.

Entirely owned and managed by members of the Toposa community, RILICOS embraces and follows basic organizational principles, including open and voluntary membership; a one-person, one-vote system; and adherence to standard business principles, including acknowledgement and acceptance of the risks and benefits of membership.

In July 2007, RILICOS began collecting milk from its pastoralist members. On the first day of operations, ten liters of fresh milk were collected and processed into two products: yoghurt, which was sold for $2 per liter, and mala, a cultured milk, which was sold at $1 per liter. Realizing the significant income-earning potential of collecting and processing milk, the women of the community soon began delivering milk in greater and greater volumes.

Unfortunately, when RILICOS opened for business, nearly half of the milk brought to the cooperative was rejected because of poor quality, as determined by organoleptic, alcohol and lactometer tests. The primary reasons for the poor quality were easily identified as poor milk handling practices and poor hygiene. Much of the milk arrived in traditional gourds, plastic bottles and jerrycans that had not been properly sanitized. In response to this constraint, Land O’Lakes procured five-liter milk cans, which the women purchased through deductions from the revenue received for milk sales. As a result, the acceptance rate of milk delivered to the cooperative quickly rose from 53 percent to 95 percent.

With the quality of the raw milk improved, Land O’Lakes taught members of the cooperative how to pasteurize milk by simply using firewood. The cooperative then introduced product packaging in polythene sachets through use of a manual heat sealing machine.

Since its inception, RILICOS’s product range has grown to include pasteurized milk, vanilla yoghurt, and strawberry yoghurt, in addition to mala and plain yoghurt. A solid customer base has developed among employees of nongovernmental organizations working in the area and has extended to the local population, which has a particularly high demand for yoghurt. To date, the more than 100 members of RILICO, of which one-third are women, have generated over $4,000 in sales.

Below: A member of the Toposa community demonstrates testing milk for alcohol content before accepting it from producers.