Employee Welfare
Our business play a major role in the life of the local communities in which they operate and we make significant contributions to the provision of housing, health care, education and food security. Following are some examples of what we do.
Housing provision
A village in Nandi
Free housing, constructed and maintained by the Company, is provided to our employees and their dependents organized into villages with each village having 40 to 80 houses. A village headman employed by the Company is in charge of the general housekeeping and security of each village.
All villages are provided with potable water, waste management and sanitation facilities.
EPK has a total of 103 villages with 5000 plus houses while at EPM we have 99 villages with 4463 houses. Meeting halls are also strategically placed to support social gatherings.
Health Care Provision
A tea estate dispensary providing medical services & care
Dispensaries are established on all our estates to provide medical services and care to employees, their dependents and other people from surrounding areas.
These are staffed by qualified medical personnel and services are free to employees and their dependents.
Education
A primary school on the Sitoi tea estate in Nandi, Kenya
Eastern Produce maintains nursery and primary schools providing free education to the children of employees, dependents and surrounding communities. By ensuring all children of school going age are in school, this supports our strict code of not using child labor in our operations.
We also support education through scholarships, bursaries, and stipends and by providing funds to establish and improve schools near our plantations or factories.
Food Security
A kitchen garden with cultivated area around the home
To ensure year-round food availability for employees, Eastern Produce has initiated a Kitchen Garden programme. Each employee is encouraged to cultivate the area around their house and plant vegetables sustainably. The key message of this program is that we do not have a land shortage but poor land usage as demonstrated by the fact that employees have been able to produce fourteen different types of vegetable sustainably, enough to feed a family of five and have surplus to sell. We educate and encourage employees to grow organically indigenous vegetables, which are highly nutritious. The result has been that there is no malnutrition on our estates.
The Kitchen Garden program supplements the ongoing provision of food staples by Eastern Produce to employees in Kenya.The Company buys maize in bulk when prices are low and sells to employees at the same price when maize is scarce cushioning employees from inflated prices charged by maize vendors.