Kenya Agricultural Productivity and Agribusiness Project

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The development objective of the Agricultural Productivity and Agribusiness Project for Kenya is to increase agricultural productivity and incomes of participating smallholder farmers in the project area. The project activities will contribute to these objectives by transforming and improving the performance of agricultural technology systems, empowering stakeholders and promoting the development of agribusiness in the project area. There are four components to the project. The first component of the project is policy/institutional and project implementation. This component will support activities that will lead to better coordination of the sector with an aim of creating the necessary impetus for a sector-wide approach. The component will also support project implementation structures, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and impact assessment. The second component of the project is agricultural research systems. This component will focus on supporting the agricultural research systems in the country and will have two sub-components: (i) support to the National Agricultural Research System (NARS); and (ii) support to Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI). The NARS sub-component objective will be to operationalize the NARS policy developed during Kenya Agricultural Productivity Project (KAPP) phase one for better coordination of agricultural research in Kenya. The third component of the project is agricultural extension, farmer and other stakeholder empowerment. This component will have two sub-components: (i) support to pluralistic and participative agricultural extension; and (ii) support to empowerment of farmers and other stakeholders, including service providers. The objective of the extension sub-component will be to support the Government to implement the National Agricultural Sector Extension Policy, which was developed during KAPP phase one. The cross-cutting empowerment sub-component will support the empowerment and organization of farmers/clients and service providers towards increased smallholder productivity and the transformation of subsistence farming to commercial agriculture. The fourth component of the project is agribusiness and market development. The objective of this component is to empower public and private stakeholders along selected commodity value chains to plan, design, and set-up sustainable agribusinesses. This component will provide support for the following activities: (i) developing agribusiness; (ii) linking rural agro-processing with off-grid energy sources; (iii) designing an agribusiness partial risk guarantee financing instrument to provide commercial banks and other financial institutions an incentive for lending to agribusiness; and (iv) developing and promoting weather-based risk insurance products to insure farmers against weather related risks.