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Louis Pope, founder of The Pope Foundation, was in Kenya on a humanitarian expedition several years ago where he quickly fell in love with the people and country. He immediately saw a great need in the rural villages in that they did not have access to capital to start and run their small businesses.
In 1999 Louis started Yehu MicroFinance which is dedicated to serving the rural people of Kenya through small loans, in further attempts to promote and fuel the rural economy we decided to introduce a micro-franchising model. Coast Coconut Farms was created to capitalize on the large natural resource of coconuts along the coast which in large part go to waste.
The mission of CCF is to empower the people, capitalize on the natural resources in rural Kenya and enable them to produce a product that can be sold locally as well as on the international market. The first coconut oil factory was started in 2005 and has quickly grown into a successful business. We currently have 20 members of the CCF team and buy from over 50 farmers representing around 500 people impacted so far (average of 7 people supported by each worker/farmer). Our first factory has become much larger then originally planned and we are now using it as a central processing facility and are designing a smaller version to be taken to households and villages along the coast. A group of engineers at Brigham Young University are designing the equipment for a micro-franchise model and we hope to have the first micro-franchises up and running by summer 2008. Our goal is to have hundreds of micro-franchises benefiting thousands of rural families and farmers. We hope to eventually introduce this same model in other countries around the world.