Camel milk offers hope in Tunisia’s poor and arid south

MÉDENINE, TUNISIA, JUNE 12 (AFP/APP/DNA):Deep in Tunisia’s desert south, camels stride toward humming milking machines. Their milk is at the heart of a women-led project promising an economic lifeline for disadvantaged communities.

Spearheading this effort is 32-year-old Latifa Frifita, who launched Tunisia’s first, and so far only, camel milk pasteurisation unit two years ago in Medenine.

The unit is based on research by Amel Sboui, 45, a senior biochemist at the Institute of Arid Regions, who succeeded in patenting a pasteurisation method that preserves camel milk’s “nutritional and therapeutic qualities” while extending its shelf life to two weeks.

Containing up to five times more iron than cow’s milk, camel milk is non-allergenic and some studies have suggested that it has immune-boosting and anti-inflammatory properties.

Pasteurisation of camel milk is essential to bringing it to wider markets because the milk is highly perishable.

Sboui and her lab of 10 researchers — eight of them women — also conducted clinical trials at the regional hospital, which showed that consuming the milk could help diabetic patients reduce their medication doses by up to half in some cases.

– Growing demand –

Jobs and investment in southern Tunisia are scarce, yet entrepreneur Frifita has pinned her hopes on a product long undervalued by local herders and is working to change their minds.

At first, she said she faced many challenges when trying to convince the herders to sell milk instead of meat — a far more common commodity.

“They didn’t see the point,” she said while testing a fresh sample of the milk, wearing a hairnet. “They usually keep it for themselves or give it away for free.”

But, having built “a relationship of trust”, and with demand for the product growing, Frifita said she planned to reach further agreements with breeders.

Frifita, who holds a master’s degree in food technologies, began sketching out her idea in 2016, but it was not until 2023 that she launched ChameLait with the support of the institute, which provided her startup with premises to operate.

Today, she is happy to “promote a local product that defines southern Tunisia”, where dromedaries are a fixture of the landscape, she said.

A mother of a two-year-old girl, she said she chose to “stay and invest in her region” rather than following her sports coach husband to the Middle East.

The station in Chenchou, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Medenine, also serves as a training site for herders to learn mechanised milking, which yields up to seven litres a day compared to just two litres with traditional hand milking.

Frifita now runs the business alongside two other women — one of them her older sister, Besma — producing about 500 litres of pasteurised milk per week with the aim of doubling their output within two years.

ChameLait sells its products on demand and through a dozen retail shops, starting at 12 Tunisian dinars (about $4) per litre — double the price Frifita pays breeders.

And the demand has been growing.

Amel Sboui, a 45-year-old senior researcher at the institute, said this was largely due to word of mouth because of “people realising the milk’s health benefits”.