Neema Livestock & Slaughtering Investment Ltd
Halal Quality Meat
For a long time, the small stocks (sheep and goats) market was hugely ignored. There had been no deliberate effort by the main meat processing companies in Kenya to meet the huge local demand for mutton (sheep meat) and chevon (goat meat). The firms thus never invested heavily on small stock processing facilities.
In 1973 a group of small scale businessmen began slaughtering small stock at their doorsteps to meet the demand for goat and sheep meat locally. Their efforts though unconventional and done under extremely low hygienic condi-tion saw the rise of the Kiamaiko slaughter houses; these were a group of individually owned slaughter houses built in the sprawling Kiamaiko area. Although the government has been lenient all along, the Kiamaiko slaughter houses never met licensing requirements fully as stipulated in the Meat Control Act, cap 356 of the Laws of Kenya, thus traders were advised to look for a suitable location to construct proper slaughter houses.
In this regard, Mr. Bonaya Bakata, being in the center of livestock and slaughtering businesses, came up with an idea to build a modern slaughterhouse to take care of this need. He brought in ten members in his team who, together with him, mobilized a total of 3000 small scale businessmen in Livestock Value chain that contributed an estimated 300 million Kenya shillings for the cons-truction of the Ultra-modern, Halal slaughterhouse. In 2010,16.5 acres of quarry land was acquired and reclaimed in Lucky Summer, Kasarani area where Neema Livestock and Slaughtering Investments Limited is located.
The shareholders started constructing NEEMA slaughter house as from October 2012. In the process NEEMA LIVESTOCK AND SLAUGHTERING INVESTMENTS LTD (NL&SIC) was registered as a limited company on 8th May 2014 and operations commenced on 1st April 2015.
The company is a limited liability owned by shareholders drawn from over 3,000 pastoralists and livestock producers coming from all over Kenya. Some have inves-ted as low as Ksh.5,000 as shareholding.
The owners include pastoralists, livestock producers, livestock traders, livestock transporters, butcher shop owners, meat transporters among others.