Kenya

"Alleviating poverty through the creation of jobs and improvement of livelihoods for rural and urban poor."

 

50 tractors have donated to kenya for strengthening the Agribusiness sector. This project is funded by both the Government of Italy and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) at a total cost of US $ 1.3 Million .The project activities commenced on 1 November 2005, implemented by the Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) under the general guidance of the Ministry of Agriculture. Click here to read the story on Kenya Government website.

While formulating this project, the parties recognized the adverse effects of the economic liberalization and the institutional reforms that took place in the agricultural sector in the 90's. These reforms, reduced and redefined the role of the state in agricultural service provision. The policy shift led to the entry of the private sector and removed state monopolies. Some of the advantages of this shift were, cash payments to small-scale farmers, diversification into non-traditional and high value cash crops and increased opportunities to process and add value to agricultural products.

While the policy shift opened new opportunities for the private sector to participate in agriculture, this did not happen as expected due to a number of limitations, such as: under-developed business management skills among farmers, unreliable supply of raw materials/inputs and limited access to financial resources. Subsequently, this affected investment decisions to the disadvantage of most of the players. For example, the policy shift led to: lack of input credit for the small-scale producers, increase in the cost of inputs, lack of a definite market for farmer's produce, collapse of farmers' organizations, which further led to the production of low quality farm produce. In addition, the rapid liberalization left the small-scale farmers with the difficult task of deciding what, when, how and for who to produce in an environment of limited market information and liberalized markets. Consequently, by the time NARC Government came to power in 2003, there was uncertainty at the production level characterized by under production or overproduction both of which led to low incomes for farmers and market confusion for investors.

Click here to read Ms Elizabeth Lwanga's speech-RR UNDP-Kenya

Click here to read President Kibaki's Speech

Newspaper clip- Daily Standard newspaper-14th December