The government is launching a Sh32 billion experimental project to stimulate new agribusinesses at the ward level from agrovets to crop and tree nurseries.
7,525 youth in 33 counties are being recruited and will be given agriculture and business training and a stipend to help launch these businesses while also providing paid advice to farmers through co-ops and free agriculture advice online.
The World Bank-funded project borrows from farmer advisory platform Kuza’s Agripreneurs Programme. Their self-sustaining model of agriculture extension which has been run in Kenya, Mozambique, and India since 2022 has trained 5,000 young rural agriculture entrepreneurs who have created 155,000 new jobs for themselves and others while supporting 750,000 smallholder farmers. According to a World Bank study, about three-quarters of these farmers had not gotten agricultural advice before but after working with these agents of change at least 60 per cent of them reported an increase in their yield.
Despite Kenya having an extension officer deficit of about 13,750 officers, the country will not close this gap anytime soon. As one of the architects of the government’s agripreneur programme put it: “The main and county governments are struggling to pay and hire doctors and teachers, they definitely cannot afford to hire thousands more extensionists.”
The agriculture entrepreneurs, agripreneurs in short who will be seven per ward are called this because, after their two-year training and mentorship period, during which they will also be working with farmers, they are expected to use the Sh10,000-15,000 monthly stipend to set up their own agriculture-related business.
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“We want the agripreneurs to use the training and the bit of money they are given to set up nurseries, agrovets, agtech solutions, advisory services, or any other businesses that will leverage their proximity to farmers and intimate understanding of their problems to offer them solutions,” explained the source involved in the programme’s implementation.
The ideal outcome the programme hopes for is Kuza’s example of five Kenyan trainees in their 2022 agripreneur programme who have set up biofertiliser, agrovet, tractor ploughing, and chemical spraying businesses.
“Robert who was part of our first group of trainees today sells biofertilisers in Nyeri to another one of our agripreneurs, Lena who he gives a 25 per cent commission. Meanwhile, Daniel runs a tractor tilling service for conservation agriculture farmers in Kirinyaga, while Joseph and his wife are offering pesticide and foliar spraying services to farmers in Embu. Between them they are serving more than 1500 farmers,” said Kuza’s Co-Founder Sriram Bharatam.
Because most agriculture in Kenya is done on small-scale farms, the Ministry of Agriculture through the one ward, one cooperative initiative is setting up co-ops that bring together all farmers involved in different agriculture value chains at each ward.
A dairy farmer co-op looking to train its members on how to increase the survival rate of their calves for example is more likely to hire the agripreneur in their village who is much more accessible and attuned with their problems than ward or sub-county agriculture officers.
They will also share free short videos, brochures, and booklets with information, gathered mainly from KALRO, on preventing calf deaths with the farmers.
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The agripreneur model assumes that there is no silver bullet for improving farmers’ livelihoods but rather “small pushes across many farming and business operations that get the ball rolling and lead to transformative results.”
However, the programme’s implementers are facing early implementation challenges which could affect how effective the programme will be in improving farmer’s lives.
While having a degree or diploma in an agriculture-related field is one of the requirements for being hired as an agripreneur, this part of the hiring process is being flouted in some counties. “MCAs have their lists of preferred hires who may not have done agriculture courses. When you have ICT guys disseminating agricultural advice they have just gotten in contact for the first time to farmers, this will impair the usefulness of the program,” they informed.
Photo Courtesy: International Institute of Tropical Agriculture