Kenya's potato advisors are learning bookkeeping now, not just blight control

Village-Based Advisors across Meru, Laikipia, Nyandarua and Nandi counties have just completed a new round of Training of Trainers sessions — the latest step in rebuilding Kenya's potato extension network from the ground up. The National Potato Council of Kenya (NPCK) says it partnered with Twinkle and Sparkle Consulting to run the sessions, part of its ongoing project work in the four counties, bringing together both experienced and newly recruited VBAs to serve as resource persons in their communities.

Training trainers rather than farmers directly signals an extension model built on multiplication: a relatively small cohort of VBAs is meant to cascade knowledge outward to farmer groups, with NPCK providing continued technical support, mentorship and supervision. That structure only works if the initial training covers more than agronomy — and the curriculum here goes well beyond crop technique. NPCK reports that VBAs received practical training in financial literacy, bookkeeping, business planning, farmer health insurance, and identifying business opportunities within the potato value chain, treating farm enterprise management as a first-order extension topic alongside technical growing knowledge rather than secondary to it. Participants also underwent refresher training on the Kenya Sustainable Potato Initiative (KSPI) itself, using the sessions as both a knowledge update and an alignment exercise to keep a dispersed advisor network working toward the same programme goals.

A distinct element was the introduction of Viazi Soko, NPCK's digital potato marketing platform. VBAs were walked through how the platform connects farmers to markets and supports commercialisation — embedding a digital marketing tool inside a business-skills curriculum ties the advisors' new bookkeeping and planning knowledge to an actual sales channel, rather than leaving those skills without a clear commercial outlet.

NPCK describes the sessions as highly interactive, giving participants room to exchange experiences and work through practical solutions together. In Laikipia County specifically, several discussions were conducted in the local language, which the Council says created a more inclusive learning environment and encouraged active participation — a detail that implies the approach wasn't uniform across all four counties, and may reflect differences in participant comfort with the training's default working language rather than a programme-wide rule.

With the sessions complete, VBAs are now expected to cascade the training to farmer groups in their respective areas, continuing under NPCK's technical support and mentorship. The Council frames this as reaffirming its commitment to a network of community-based extension providers capable of supporting enterprise development and accelerating KSPI. The real test comes at the cascade stage — whether VBAs can translate financial literacy and bookkeeping concepts into formats farmer groups can readily adopt, and whether Viazi Soko sees increased farmer uptake as a downstream result.