Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe has launched one of the most extensive crackdowns on milk hawking the country has ever seen, warning that the unregulated sale of raw milk is quietly putting millions of Kenyan families — especially young children — at serious risk, while silently strangling the growth of a dairy industry with the potential to feed the world.
Speaking during the flagging off of 25 bulk milk coolers at Uhuru Park in Nairobi on Wednesday, May 20, Kagwe left no room for ambiguity.
“Milk hawking must stop. It is dangerous, it is a health issue, and it destroys the ability to create value-added dairy products,” he declared.
The CS warned that a large and growing share of Kenya’s milk supply moves through brokers and street hawkers who operate entirely outside regulated collection, cooling, and quality inspection systems. The result, he said, is that millions of Kenyans consume milk every day that cannot be traced, tested, or guaranteed safe.
“If you have young children, feed them quality and traceable milk to avoid health issues such as diarrhoea,” Kagwe urged parents.
Beyond the health risks, Kagwe accused milk hawking networks of systematically weakening the country’s formal dairy infrastructure — undermining processors, hollowing out cooperatives, and cutting farmers off from the higher earnings that come with processed dairy products like yoghurt, cheese, and milk powder.
To dismantle this informal grip on the sector, the Ministry of Agriculture is rolling out 230 milk coolers to dairy cooperatives nationwide under a Ksh1.43 billion support programme. Of these, 95 have already been deployed, with the remainder to follow in phases. The coolers are designed to reduce spoilage, stabilize prices, and pull farmers away from brokers toward organized collection systems.
A livestock official from Kakamega County confirmed the scale of the problem on the ground. “Many brokers are selling milk directly to consumers. Milk coolers will help organise farmers and reduce hawking,” the official said.
Under the new reforms, processors and cooperatives will be required to establish full traceability systems — tracking the source of every litre, identifying individual farmers and their production levels, and verifying the integrity of the supply chain from farm to shelf.
Kagwe also outlined plans to cut production costs through government-supported cultivation of yellow maize and soya beans for animal feed, and to accelerate dairy genetics reform through a subsidised sexed semen programme that has already slashed the cost of sexed semen from Ksh9,000 to just Ksh1,000.
The CS drew the line sharply on the country’s ambitions: “We want to make sure there is no milk pricing coming down. Rain seasons and dry seasons should not destabilize farmers.”
With thousands of jobs expected to emerge across milk cooling, transport, veterinary services, and processing, Kenya’s war on milk hawking is not just a health campaign — it is a full restructuring of the country’s dairy economy, one cooler at a time.
