Kenya’s smallholder poultry farmers need feed. Kisii County needs 80,000 tons of animal feed annually. It consumes 14,000. The other 66,000 tons — the gap — is unmet demand sitting in a rural county that domestic manufacturers have never prioritized.

Boka Eats started as the Boka Youth manufacturing companies — a group of college-educated Kenyan women at Kisii University, paying for their education by building and running profitable businesses for their local market.

Animal feed was the first formal product. They sourced raw materials from local smallholder farmers, manufactured feed for poultry farmers in Kisii County, and sold direct. The group was not built on grant money. It was built on the logic that a county with 66,000 tons of unmet demand was simply waiting for someone to show up with a product.

In 2022, Boka Eats signed a 30-year lease to operate the Kisii Banana Factory — a €1.2 million EU-funded facility that had been underutilized. Africa Eats funded the solar array and batteries, providing 24/7 electricity to a facility that the rural grid couldn’t reliably power. The banana processing capacity now sits alongside the animal feed operation.

Boka Eats manufactures animal feeds and banana flour from the Kisii Banana Factory in Kisii County, sourcing raw materials from local smallholder farmers and serving poultry and livestock farmers across the mountainous western Kenya region.

The team of five women runs both the feed manufacturing operation and the banana processing facility — a combination that uses the same local agricultural raw materials for two distinct product lines, both of which address demand that the formal market had ignored.