Anyone who has worked in rural Kenya knows the closing ceremony of a donor-backed project.
The tent goes up, certificates are handed out, the project banner is photographed one last time and the vehicles with donor logos drive off down the murram road.
Too often, a season or two later, the
demonstration plot is overgrown, the extension officer has no fuel allowance
and the farmers who were promised a market and buyer are back to selling to
whoever turns up at the gate.
As Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa marks 20 years, that scene deserves more honest attention than any success story. Kenya does not lack projects that work. What it lacks is a dependable way of turning them into permanent systems.
AGRA is an African-led institution founded to transform African agriculture from a struggle for survival into a thriving business. Its 20-year review of African agriculture calls this problem the capability trap: the gap in institutions, finance, policy and skills that stops good strategies from producing lasting results.
It occurs alongside a productivity trap, where output is too low or too exposed to shocks and a value trap, in which bigger harvests fail to become higher incomes.
The next phase of Kenya’s agricultural transformation will be decided in the counties, which hold the constitutional mandate for agricultural and trade development. It should be judged by one test: how many proven models are still running, and still paying farmers, after the donors have gone home.
Take the evidence from eastern Kenya. Between 2022 and 2025, the Strengthening Regenerative Agriculture in Kenya project (Strak), implemented by AGRA with support from the IKEA Foundation, worked across Makueni, Kitui, Embu and Tharaka Nithi, a region where failed rains are a familiar hazard.
It reached 120,060 farmers with practices that rebuild soil and hold moisture, a direct answer to the productivity trap on a continent where roughly two-thirds of productive land is degraded.
It trained 635 village-based advisers, local farmers who give advice, sell inputs and aggregate produce for a commission.
By last year’s assessment, 506 of them were still at work, roughly four in five. Together, advisers had earned Sh66.6 million and moved 7,503 tonnes of cereals and pulses to market.
Yet the project also exposed the capability trap that threatens every good pilot: public financing was thin, extension capacity stretched and coordination weak and nobody could yet say whether agriculture advisory work pays enough to last.
All four counties infused regenerative agriculture and the adviser model into their County Integrated Development Plans for 2023-27.
A development plan is a promise, but a budget line, a staff establishment and a supply contract are commitments. Kenyan agriculture keeps losing its best ideas in the distance between the two, the plan and the implementation.
Devolution leaves little doubt about who should close that distance. Under the Fourth Schedule of the Constitution, agriculture, county roads, cooperatives and trade development belong to county governments, while the national government sets agricultural policy.
Whether a harvest earns money depends on the feeder road, the water point, the market shed, the cooperative, the aggregation centre and the extension officer, and each of these answers to the county.
A farmer can double her or his yield and still lose money if the
lorry cannot reach her village after the rains. That is the value trap, and no
amount of farmer training will fix it.
Because the three traps must be tackled together, AGRA’s current strategy concentrates on priority value chains developed end to end, secondary chains anchored by commercial firms, stronger national systems and support for government priorities.
Training farmers to grow more achieves little when no buyer can absorb the crop, and a processor cannot expand when working capital is short and supply unreliable.
A county that backs a few value chains with genuine demand gives itself something concrete around which to coordinate extension, finance, roads, farmer groups, aggregators and processors. Anchor firms can then organise sourcing and guarantee offtake, provided the terms leave fair value with farmers, women and young people.
The strongest objection is that counties are hardly flush, and this deserves a straight answer. Handing counties responsibility, sceptics argue, merely moves the cliff edge from the donor’s exit to the county treasury.
But that objection assumes counties must pay for everything, and Strak suggests otherwise. Advisers who earned Sh66.6 million in commissions are running businesses rather than drawing allowances. What they need from government is narrower: incentives, transport support, quality assurance and a formal place within county extension services.
The practical task is to decide, service by service, what the public purse must carry and what commerce or farmer organisations can sustain. The same sorting applies to digital advisory platforms, irrigation, aggregation centres and farm credit and insurance products.
The capital exists if counties make their value chains worth backing. AGRA puts Africa’s agrifood financing gap at about $180 billion a year, $65 billion of it among the small and medium agribusinesses that connect farmers to markets. That is an investment opportunity, not only a development problem.
A county with clear priorities, passable roads and reliable supply is somewhere lenders and investors can put money; a county spread thin across everything is not.
We therefore propose that each county agrees an agricultural transformation compact, tied to Kenya’s commitments under the Kampala Declaration on African agriculture, with national government, development partners, lenders and agribusinesses and name a few priority value chains, the constraints holding each back, who must remove them and who pays.
It would also change what gets counted: farm incomes first, then produce sold, private investment attracted, jobs created and services still running after a project closes.
Farmers trained and demonstration plots planted do not describe change. AGRA’s own evidence is blunt that farmers who cannot break even abandon new practices, however good those practices are.
No two compacts will look alike, because soils, rainfall and markets differ from one county to the next. What travels is the underlying lesson:lasting change rests on capable local institutions, commercial relationships that pay their way and delivery that is coordinated rather than stacked.
Development partners will keep bringing money and ideas, and they should. After 20 years, though, AGRA and its partners ought to be judged less by what they started than by what outlived them.
So, before the next pilot is launched in Kenya, someone should be able to say what has already worked there, what is stopping it from spreading, and which institution will still be running it long after the tent has come down and the vehicles have gone.
It is therefore paramount that the Council of Governors champion this agenda as a strategic priority, mobilising counties to align their policies, investments and partnerships around resilient, productive and market-oriented food systems that deliver higher incomes, food security and economic opportunity. AGRA remains committed to supporting this pathway.
Lusaka is the governor of Bungoma county and Ruhweza is the president of AGRA
