Potato earns a seat at Kenya's $-billion AgriConnect table — recognition, not yet funding

A five-year national agricultural transformation agenda does not usually make room for a single tuber. But Kenya's potato value chain has landed inside one of the most ambitious agricultural policy frameworks the country has drafted in years.

The National Potato Council of Kenya (NPCK) took part in the pre-launch of the Kenya AgriConnect Compact on 16 June 2026 at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Nairobi's Upper Hill district, joining government officials, development partners, private sector players and other agricultural stakeholders to discuss how a compact running from 2025 to 2030 will actually get implemented. The Compact is aligned with the World Bank's global AgriConnect Initiative, with broad stated goals: lift agricultural production, create decent employment, strengthen food systems, and improve the sector's competitiveness and resilience.

It rests on four pillars — raising agricultural production and productivity by 50 percent; scaling up value addition, agro-processing and aggregation across priority value chains; expanding access to profitable domestic and export markets; and strengthening enablers such as policy coherence, institutional capacity, agricultural finance, digital systems and contract enforcement. Those enabler categories matter as much as the growth targets themselves — aggregation and contract enforcement are exactly the bottlenecks that have historically slowed smallholder-heavy value chains in Kenya from reaching commercial buyers at scale. The 2030 targets attached to the Compact are specific: roughly 2.48 million new and better jobs, a 50 percent productivity increase, food insecurity cut in half, imports of maize, rice and edible oils reduced by at least 50 percent, high-value agricultural exports expanded by 60 percent, agro-industrial value doubled, and irrigated land expanded from 760,000 to 1.5 million acres.

NPCK did not simply attend the pre-launch as an observer. The Council says it played an active role in the consultative process that shaped the Compact, supplying industry data, technical expertise and insight into the state of Kenya's potato industry — a contribution it credits with helping the Technical Working Group identify potato as one of the country's priority agricultural value chains, tied explicitly to its role in food security, nutrition, employment and economic growth. That inclusion is the real substance of this story: national transformation compacts tend to default to a country's largest cereal crops, and a horticultural staple like potato earning a seat depends on organised stakeholders showing up with data during the drafting phase, not after targets are already set.

NPCK frames its participation as a reaffirmation of its broader advocacy role — continuing to push for policies and investment that raise productivity, strengthen markets, promote value addition and improve farmer livelihoods. What it doesn't specify is what dedicated funding, targets or programming the potato value chain will actually receive once the Compact moves from pre-launch to implementation, or how the four pillars will be sequenced across specific value chains. That gap between inclusion on a priority list and concrete allocation is where compacts like this one typically succeed or stall — being named a priority value chain is a starting position, not a guarantee of resources.