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Episode 5: A dairy for Senegal
Dairy farmers are among the poorest members of the population in Senegal, West Africa. Most of the milk they produce is poured away – simply because they have no way to store it and no one to sell it to. That's a serious situation – and not just for the farmers. For the children of low-income Senegalese families, it means an important source of nutrition is lost. And the rate of child malnutrition is high.
This is the story of the visionary young vet, Bagoré Bathily, who started a dairy to raise the standard of living for local farmers and produce affordable yoghurt for low-income families. Today, he works with Danish innovators to make each litre of milk go further and help farmers get more milk from their cows – to even greater benefit to the country's large low-income population.
Meet the team
Bagoré Bathily
After growing up in Senegal, Bagoré studied to be a vet in Belgium. He then spent two years working in France before taking a job with an NGO in Mauritania, which shares a border with Senegal. He was struck by the contrasting working conditions for dairy farmers in the two countries. This was when his vision was born - to found a dairy in Senegal using milk collected from local farmers. Today, his Dolima yoghurts are a popular, affordable brand among low-income families.
Charlotte Sørensen
Charlotte is business development manager at Arla Foods Ingredients, a Denmark-based company specialised in whey ingredients. In recent years, she has driven the company's affordable food initiatives. Working with international partners, the focus is to support the development of sustainable dairy supply chains in countries where many families live on just a few dollars a day and child malnutrition is high. The aim is to help grow local production of affordable, nutritious foods.
Per Østergaard
Per supplies Arla with 900,000 litres of milk a year from his dairy farm in northern Jutland, which he has run for more than 40 years. Since 2007, he has regularly worked as a consultant on projects in Africa. His role is to help local farmers raise the milk yield of their cows to European levels. On one African farm, milk production per cow went up from four litres a day to 20 litres a day within just one year – with the same cows.
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