Progress Blooms on Kenyan Soil
For years, Nancy Nthenya witnessed her female co-workers being fired for rebuffing their supervisor’s sexual advances.
The single mother assumed that she too would lose her job when she mustered the courage to report how he would promise her a promotion for a quick hotel rendezvous.
But what happened was virtually unheard of in Kenya. After an investigation, her employer, Sher Agencies Ltd., sacked the manager and 11 others in a sexual harassment crackdown that drew gasps from management offices and cheers from the greenhouses of Kenya’s largest flower farm.
It was an opening salvo in what has become a workplace revolution at Sher, which during the last four years has tried to transform itself from one of the industry’s most reviled employers to one of its most progressive.
Along with a new sexual harassment policy, the company created a “gender committee” with direct access to top executives. Paid maternity leave this year will increase from three to four months, twice the government-set minimum.
Wages remain low and working conditions are tough. But the company says it is helping to reduce workers’ pain: It has built an on-site hospital, a day-care center, a grade school and a high school -- all free of charge to employees and their families.
“There’s been a huge change,” said Nthenya, 30, a flower grader who sorts and bundles hundreds of freshly cut roses a day. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Sher’s turnaround was spurred largely by the Dutch company’s Western customers who participated in an international campaign to shame Kenya’s flower growers into improving working conditions. But Sher’s experience also shows how a do-good approach can sometimes be good for business.
Productivity among Sher’s workers is up, and sick leave and job turnover are down, said Peter Barnhoorn, the company’s managing director.
Sher has not been shy about publicizing its new “corporate responsibility” to European buyers. Its bouquet labels and website assure buyers that part of their money will build schools and hospitals in Africa.
Under some socially conscious purchase programs, European supermarkets sometimes pay 5% to 10% more to farms that qualify under their fair-trade policies. The Dutch-born Barnhoorn said the company routinely invited buyers to tour its farm here.
“This is what our customers want,” he said. “Once they visit the farm and see all our facilities, the business always comes to us.”
Flower industry executives reluctantly acknowledge Sher’s strides in improving workplace conditions but note that Sher -- with about 25% of Kenya’s export market -- can more easily afford the investment.
About 1 in 5 roses from here ends up in the U.S. via Amsterdam flower auctions.
Some accuse Sher of using its workplace benefits to curry favor with government officials and distract from the company’s presence on the shores of Lake Naivasha. Other flower farms have moved off the environmentally sensitive land amid studies showing that lakeside development is depleting and poisoning the water.
“Personally, I think it’s a little bit of a guilt trip because they realize what they are doing to the lake is not good,” said Jane Ngige, head of the Kenya Flower Council, a trade group that represents most large flower farms, with the notable exception of Sher.
Barnhoorn denied that Sher’s activities caused environmental harm to the lake.
His family bought the nearly 1,000-acre farm in 1997 with some private partners and now claims to be the world’s largest rose producer, selling 600 million stems a year. Sher, which employs more than 5,000 workers in Kenya, is privately held and does not release revenue or profit figures.
Kenya’s flower industry exploded in the 1990s thanks to the temperate climate and year-round sunshine in this central province of Rift Valley, once known as Happy Valley. In the 1930s, the lakeside retreat was a hotbed of wife swapping, drugs and partying by rich British colonialists, depicted in the book and film “White Mischief.”
Today the area remains a popular tourist playground, with roaming hippos and impalas. In recent years, much of the natural landscape has been replaced by rows of massive plastic greenhouses.
In less than a decade, Kenya has become the European Union’s No. 1 supplier of fresh-cut flowers. With an estimated 100,000 employees, the flower industry is one of the nation’s most promising economic engines, generating more than $250 million a year and rivaling tea, tourism and coffee as top foreign-exchange earners.
But four years ago, Sher and other Kenya flower producers found themselves at the center of a brewing international scandal over working conditions. Problems on the flower farms mirrored those faced by workers in Kenya’s agriculture sector. Workers earned less than $1 a day. Unions were banned. To avoid offering benefits, many farms classified full-time employees as seasonal. Bribing managers to secure jobs was common.
Because about 70% of the flower workers are female, attention quickly focused on the plight of women. Surveys found that as many as 90% of female workers complained of sexual harassment. Many women reported that the harsh chemicals and insecticides caused illness, miscarriages and irregular menstrual cycles.
Some farms scrambled to change their ways after a coalition of Kenyan and European advocacy groups threatened to organize a worldwide boycott of Kenya’s “bloodstained” flowers.
“We had to step up and give our business a different name,” said Martine Ole Kamwaro, an attorney hired by Sher in 2002 to revamp its workplace.
Sher spent several million dollars constructing an old-fashioned company town along the banks of Lake Naivasha, supporting a community of nearly 20,000 with housing units that include electricity and water, considered a luxury for Kenyan agricultural workers. There’s even a clubhouse and soccer field, called Sher Stadium.
Barnhoorn estimated that the company spent $5.2 million a year on subsidizing new worker benefits, including supplying textbooks for the schools and buying drugs for the hospital.
Union membership soared from 5% to nearly 80%, and the company virtually eliminated its reliance on temporary workers.
Last year Sher became one of Kenya’s first farms to introduce ATM cards and direct-deposit bank accounts, which have been popular with women who never had the chance to hold bank accounts.
Previously, Sendi Nakumicha, 18, a greenhouse worker, handed her monthly cash salary to her husband, who she said sometimes spent the money drinking with buddies. Since receiving an ATM card, she said, she has saved $150 in her account.
In April, Nakumicha gave birth to a girl in Sher’s hospital. When she returns to work, the child will be taken care of at the day-care facility, which offers daily meals. After that, Nakumicha said, her daughter will attend school, a privilege that Nakumicha could never afford.
“This girl,” she said, smiling down at the infant, “is going all the way.”
Sher is helping to create a much-needed platform to discuss women’s rights in Kenya, which despite some democratic and economic progress still lags behind other African nations in the advancement and protection of women.
Female representation in the Kenyan parliament and the Cabinet is among the lowest in East Africa. There are no laws banning sexual harassment, guaranteeing equal pay or even protecting pregnant women from being fired.
By offering benefits that exceed government and union requirements, Sher is beginning to draw praise from local advocacy groups, which hope that other employers will follow.
Last year the Kenyan Human Rights Council, one of the flower industry’s most outspoken critics, anointed Sher the best flower farm in the country.
“They went from the worst to one of the best,” said Kathini Maloba, general secretary of the Kenya Women Workers Organization, a Nairobi-based advocacy group that helped draw international attention to Kenya’s flower industry four years ago. “They’ve reacted more positively than any other farm.”
Although she cautions that no flower farm deserves a “clean bill of health,” Maloba said she was using Sher’s programs to pressure other flower farms and other female-dominated industries such as coffee, tea and garment making to offer similar benefits.
“We are seeing an influence on other industries,” she said.
A recent survey by her group found improvement in workplace conditions among some large flower farms but continued problems at many smaller companies, which continue to ban unions, improperly classify full-time employees as seasonal and use dangerous chemicals.
Even at Sher, workers complain about low pay and backbreaking work. Each worker processes about 2,700 stems a day, stooping over long rows of rosebushes in the greenhouses or sorting through the thorny flowers in dank packinghouses.
Pressure to work quickly is immense because the perishable product must make it from greenhouses in Kenya to supermarkets in Europe in 48 hours.
Employees work six days a week, earning a base pay of about $70 a month, or about Kenya’s minimum wage.
“It’s not really enough to get by, but it’s the best job I could find,” said Cecilia Akware, a greenhouse worker and single mother who also helps support a sibling still in school.
Top managers at Sher are still mostly men, but women are slowly climbing their way up.
“I supervise 1,200 workers and nine pack houses, and look at me: I’m this short woman,” said Rosabel Nyamu, 32, one of six female managers at Sher. “I feel good about that.”
