Tonight is my final night here in Mwingi. By the time I fly out of Nairobi on Tuesday morning, I will have spent exactly 120 nights away from England, staying in everything from rat-infested hotel rooms to ambassadorial residences and pitching my tent both in ditches and picturesque lake-side spots. It’s certainly been a trek, but what has been the point?

When I set off, four months ago, I had three aims for this trip: firstly, I wanted to visit the project for my own benefit, to find out exactly what it was about and to meet the people it was helping; second, I felt that it was important to show the many people who have supported my fund-raising over the last few years that it was worth the effort; and third, I hoped that it would inspire more people to donate some of their hard-earned money to FARM-Africa.

I certainly achieved the first one, you’ll have to let me know about the second one and, as for the third one, there’s still time!

One of the most reassuring things about visiting the project here in Mwingi has been that it is not perfect. That may seem like a strange thing to find reassuring, but the fact is that nothing is perfect. Therefore, if it appeared perfect, then I clearly wasn’t being shown a true representation of what’s going on. Most importantly, the individuals running the project know that it isn’t perfect, and are always looking for ways to improve it. When I visited Meru, the location for the original implementation of this model, a number of points came up where I was told that it didn’t quite go to plan first time around, but for each one they’d made necessary amendments here in Mwingi in an attempt to ensure the same mistakes didn’t happen again.

And they’ve certainly had their fair share of obstacles to success. Mwingi has what is technically entitled a “semi-arid” climate. Well, when you’ve had six failed rainy seasons, that starts to appear a very loose term. Yet, despite the environmental problems which are set to continue to cause huge problems across major parts of Kenya, the project has been successful. Given more favourable conditions perhaps it could be even more so, but any project that can survive the kind of challenges this one has faced deserves significant support.

I could recite all kinds of figures giving the number of goats that the beneficiaries now have, the volume of milk they’re producing and the sums of money they’re raising through the sale of their offspring, but I won’t. Partly because I have no idea what they are, other than the fact that they’re large and impressive, but that’s not the point. I’d much rather resort to pathetic cliches that, in this case, just happen to be entirely true.

Every beneficiary I’ve met – and it feels like I’ve met nearly every one of the more than 1,000 in Kitui and Mwingi – has a story to tell about how the project has affected their life. Every beneficiary had a smile on their face and was desperate to show off their pride and joy: their goats. In the relatively short time that the project has been running, these individuals have gone from being the poorest people within a poor country to being able to feed their families, to being able to fund their children through school, to being respected by their peers and, perhaps most importantly, to having pride in themselves and their accomplishments.

It hasn’t turned them into wealthy families, by any means – they’d still make a mockery out of what is regularly labelled as “poverty” in the UK – but FARM-Africa has assisted them in taking that first step up the ladder. The rest is up to them and, armed with the confidence and skills they have gained, there is no reason they can’t continue climbing higher and higher.

Should the Kenyan Government be doing more to help its own people? Probably, yes, and I hope that the appropriate people are putting pressure on them to do so rather than relying on NGOs to continue to do the work for them. But until that changes, I’m very thankful that there are people willing to help organisations like FARM-Africa do the work they’re doing and continue to make a difference to people’s lives.

(Maybe now would be a good time to remind you about www.justgiving.com/pedallingalltheway. No reason, just felt like mentioning it!)