“People with disabilities should be given the opportunity, in any society”: Lucy Linet’s story
“People living with a disability, people ignore them. They think that they cannot do anything, that when they go to the farm they cannot do it. But they should be given the opportunity.”
Lucy Linet lives with her husband and four children in Homa Bay County, Kenya. She is a farmer and runs a successful business where she sells seeds, fertiliser and other farming products.
Under the Global Labor Program – Inclusive Futures Lucy Linet has the role of farm hub manager. She supports the farmers in her hub, including farmers with disabilities, to access to farm inputs and machinery, advice and potential markets for their produce. To help her fulfil this role, she has received training on planting and harvesting methods to get better yields, as well as crop aggregation and marketing.
Lucy Linet saw the opportunity to set up a shop due to the high costs of the products she was having to buy for her farm:
“I came to realise, because I was a farmer, the products I was using on the farm were so many and the prices – I could see the profit I could get. When I started the business, I started with 20,000 shillings [around U$D 165].”
She explains that the demand for products from her shop is very high but farmers are struggling to afford the rising prices caused by a spike in the cost of basic commodities:
“The prices of the products are so high, which could make them [the farmers] not get them at the right time. Like now we are in the planting season, people have started planting when they come to buy fertiliser. They cannot afford the price – [before] they bought it at 700 [shillings] and now it is thirteen [hundred].”
Many farmers with disabilities face the added costs of hiring machinery to plough and till land, extra labour to help on their farms, plus the cost of transporting produce to market.
Despite these challenges, Lucy Linet believes that people with disabilities just need the opportunity and the right support to show others what they can achieve:
“People living with a disability, people ignore them, [they think] that they cannot do anything, that when they go to the farm they cannot do it. But they should be given the opportunity, in any society.”
Lucy Linet is excited about the future and wants others to have the same ambition she has:
“I want [my business] to grow and have more branches than this. I would like to be a distributor of the farm inputs. All the products, animal feeds, poultry products, herbicides, generally farm inputs – I would like to be a distributor like others.”
“The advice I can give is that when you start a journey, you will reach only if you have that interest and you are ambitious in whatever you are doing. When you start a project, just do it, bit by bit. Just a few shillings per day, it will add somewhere, it will help with the school fees, the basic needs. And it will help you grow, grow, grow better than where you started.”
Listen to Lucy Linet and her hopes for the future:
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