By James Odhiambo

The Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute (KIRDI) has shelved its years-long research into affordable sunflower oil presses for farmers, opting instead to offer oil extraction as a paid-for service under its Common Manufacturing Facility (CMF) program.

The state agency, which is mandated to conduct industrial research and promote innovation, had been exploring ways to increase access to sunflower processing equipment for smallholder farmers. But it has now turned its limited equipment over to fee-paying production, saying the costs of importing presses are too high to support wider rollout or continued development.

“There is a pressing need for more machines across the country, but the cost of a single imported press is about Sh250,000, which is out of reach for most small-scale farmers,” said a KIRDI official. “We currently only have a few presses operating at our South C office in Nairobi.”

The move comes despite a surge in sunflower production driven by government campaigns to reduce reliance on imported vegetable oils. Many farmers have embraced the crop, which is fast-maturing and drought-tolerant, but now face major bottlenecks in accessing oil presses.

Sunflower oil currently sells for about Sh400 a litre in the Kenyan market, yet the number of operational presses remains extremely limited. Farmers across the country report long delays, travel costs, and risks of seed spoilage due to the lack of local processing capacity. Some have been forced to store their seed for months or sell it unpressed at lower prices.

“We see farmers coming from far away just to access our machines, and some lose quality in transit, which affects the oil yield,” said the KIRDI representative.

Sunflower presses in Kenya are mostly imported and expensive, leading to local production increases without parallel investment in processing infrastructure. Some farmers had hoped KIRDI’s research mandate would lead to the development of affordable, farmer-owned equipment, but the institute has now confirmed it has paused all such research.

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Instead, farmers are now directed to bring their seed to the KIRDI facility in South C, where it is weighed, dehulled, conditioned, and passed through expeller extraction and filtration systems. Oil is then either returned to the farmer or marketed by KIRDI on the farmer’s behalf.

The service runs under KIRDI’s Common Manufacturing Facility program, which offers short-term shared use of industrial equipment for processing and prototyping. But it comes with no fixed rate card. “We negotiate the pricing with each farmer depending on the hours, support needed, and machine usage,” the representative said.

However, KIRDI said it had no fixed rates per hour or volume and sets rates with farmers on an ad hoc, negotiated basis for each farmer, making for a striking departure from the norm of publicly funded organisations offering transparent pricing that is fair across all users. 

The organisation, meanwhile, acknowledges research is still needed, but it said it could not currently afford farmer-scale research. “We are yet to begin any new research on pressing machine availability and reliability,” the official said.

With demand for sunflower oil rising and farmers responding by increasing planting, the continued shortage of presses threatens to stall Kenya’s ambition to cut cooking oil imports. Farmers and sector analysts are now urging renewed investment in decentralised processing and affordable technologies to unlock the full value of Kenya’s sunflower potential.