Nakuru Tubers bets on certified seed to break Kenya's Shangi dependence

In the potato markets that ring Nairobi and the highland towns west of the Rift, one name settles most transactions: Shangi. The variety is fast-maturing, versatile in the kitchen and trusted by traders — and that popularity has become a structural weakness. The Crop Trust estimates Shangi now commands 60 to 70 percent of Kenya's total potato production, a concentration that leaves the country's roughly 800,000 smallholder growers exposed to a single point of failure. When a disease or a bad season hits Shangi, it hits almost everyone at once.

Nakuru Tubers, a young enterprise based in Nakuru County, has built its model around that vulnerability. Founded by a team of Kenyan agricultural researchers and led by founder and managing director Winnie Wambugu, the company produces certified seed potato and sells it alongside agronomy training and distribution support. Wambugu, who brings a background in horticulture, seed-potato research and business management, frames the problem in blunt terms: farmers are devoted to Shangi, and persuading them to diversify is hard when the market rewards what they already grow. Co-founder Enock Rugut, who heads production, has argued publicly that Kenya needs new varieties able to withstand the climate and disease pressure that Shangi increasingly cannot.

The technical core is seed multiplication. Most Kenyan smallholders replant tubers saved from previous crops or bought informally — material that accumulates viral and bacterial load and loses vigour over successive generations, which is a central reason yields stay far below potential. Nakuru Tubers works the other end of that chain, using tissue culture, hydroponics, aeroponics and apical cuttings to generate clean planting material that can then be bulked up into certified seed. The approach mirrors a wider shift in East African seed systems toward soilless and rapid-multiplication techniques that compress the years it traditionally takes to move from a laboratory plantlet to field-ready seed.

Much of that work sits under an academic umbrella. The company operates in association with Egerton University, and credits the institution's Center of Excellence in Sustainable Agriculture and Agribusiness Management (CESAAM) with support and sponsorship — a link that gives a small enterprise access to research infrastructure and varietal expertise it could not build alone. Nakuru Tubers used the 2024 Nakuru Agricultural Show, exhibiting from the Egerton stand, to put its propagation methods and candidate varieties in front of farmers and students, pitching certified, climate-resilient seed as the foundation for both higher yields and steadier market trade.

The enterprise is candid that the commercial reality runs through Shangi for now. Heading into the 2025 planting season it announced it was multiplying certified Shangi seed sourced from trusted producers, on the logic that clean stock of the variety farmers actually want is a more credible entry point than asking them to switch outright. Each batch, the company says, is inspected to confirm it is disease-free and well adapted to local soils. Storage is part of the pitch too: seed is held in a ventilated, diffused-light store that keeps tubers dormant and healthy between seasons — a low-cost technology that addresses the post-harvest losses which quietly erode smallholder margins.

Distribution is deliberately practical. Nakuru Tubers runs an agro-dealer outlet where farmers can book seed ahead of the season, and layers on training in climate-smart agronomy and financial literacy alongside the planting material. That bundling — seed, knowledge and a reliable buyer-side relationship — reflects a recognition that certified seed on its own rarely changes outcomes if farmers lack the agronomy to use it or the market to sell the surplus.

The ambitions are large for the company's size. Its stated goal is to reach 20,000 smallholder farmers by 2030, with a longer-horizon vision of touching hundreds of thousands across Kenya. Those are aspirations rather than audited figures, and the gap between a research-backed pilot and national scale is exactly where most seed ventures stall: certified seed is capital-intensive, slow to bulk, and competes against free saved tubers. Whether Nakuru Tubers clears that gap will depend on financing and on its ability to keep multiplication volumes rising season after season.

What makes the enterprise worth watching is less its scale today than the problem it has chosen. Kenya's potato economy is productive enough to feed a Shangi monoculture but fragile precisely because of it. A pipeline that can deliver clean seed of the dominant variety now, while quietly building demand for the climate-resilient alternatives the country will need later, is the kind of two-track strategy the sector has talked about for years and rarely executed. Nakuru Tubers is, at minimum, executing.