Under the project Support to Employment Creation in Mongolia: Component 2: Piloting quality private sector work in selected livestock and vegetable value chains (SECIM: C2 GCP /MON/014/EC), an European Union supported four year programme with the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Light Industry (MOFALI), UNFAO has been requested to provide additional support to achieve the overall objective. This Technical Cooperation Project (TCP) will provide specific targeted support in the area of small scale dairy processing, packaging and marketing. Currently, 160,000 herder households process milk from horse, cow, yak, camel and goats at home in isolated homesteads during their spring, summer and autumn nomadic camps. These products are largely for household and local and extended family consumption but there are opportunities to improve the quality through improved food safety practices, better equipment (e.g. stainless steel, improved ger kitchens), common packaging/labels, group marketing and new products in district (soum) centres.

In rural areas, women are based in soum centers most of the time to take care of their children at primary school and often unemployed. To address employment generation for women in rural areas and within the scope of “Improving Local Dairy Processing through promoting women” under the SECiM project, 6 soums of Khovd, Khuvsgul, Selenge and Dornod aimags were selected.

For the women groups in selected soums, the project is providing technical assistance to re-model “Ger Kitchen” which would introduce better practices of dairy production using applicable modern tools and small equipment and result in improved and marketable product, thus increasing the income of rural women residing in soum centers.

Within the scope of “Improving Local Dairy Processing through promoting women”, Dairy TCP training of trainers was conducted on December 8-10, 2017 in collaboration with Institute of Technology following up the Study Tour to Xilinhot, Inner Mongolia. Study tour to Xilingol, Inner Mongolia was organized on November 29 – December 6, 2017 to compare and contrast the traditional technologies and practice of using applicable tools and equipment in traditional dairy production. Twelve participants have been selected from 6 target soums from Dornod, Khovd, Khuvsgul and Selenge aimags for training.

It is expected that 120 women provided employment after 6 small milk processing center “Ger Kitchen” established in 6 different soums. It was projected  to make 7.1 million tugrug profit from each milk processing center. It expected to contribute 350,000 Mongolian tugrug income generated  per  household.