By Abdimalik Hajir - Reporter
Kenya, 17 June 2026 - Cabinet Secretary for Agriculture and Livestock Development Mutahi Kagwe has officially unveiled the Kenya AgriConnect Compact (2025–2030), a bold national agricultural transformation initiative engineered to shift the sector from subsistence farming into a modern economic powerhouse.
The CS stated that the Agriconnect Compact positions agriculture not as a subsistence sector, but as a modern, technology-enabled, climate-smart, and investment-ready engine for inclusive economic transformation.
At the core of this ambitious strategy is a heavy emphasis on digitalisation and technology, which will see the deployment of digital extension services, agritech platforms for market traceability, and advanced processing technologies designed to eliminate crippling post-harvest losses.
To fuel this transition, Kagwe said the government is committing $3.8 billion in catalytic public funds, strategically structured to de-risk the sector and crowd in a massive $7.6 billion in private sector investment.
"The Agriconnect Compact is a deliberate, strategic, and urgent framework to align public investment with private sector ambition where public investment finances foundational systems and public goods, reducing risks and creating an enabling environment that attracts large-scale private capital," he said.
By leveraging public-private partnerships, the CS noted that it blend finance, and credit guarantees, the framework fundamentally changes the risk profile of agricultural lending, turning local value chains, such as dairy, edible oils, and horticulture, into highly attractive, lucrative targets for private capital.
Beyond production, this comprehensive framework he added prioritises market systems transformation by upgrading infrastructure, rolling out digital marketplaces, and developing structured trading systems to ensure farmers are no longer exploited by fragmented value chains.
The CS assured market reforms are aggressively targeted at slashing costly imports of food staples like rice and maize by 50%, while driving a 60% surge in high-value exports to global markets. Most importantly, this market-driven growth is directly tied to solving the nation's employment crisis.
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The CS said Agriconnect Compact is uniquely engineered to create 2.482 million new and upgraded better jobs by 2030, absorbing the youth into dignified roles across agro-processing, logistics, digital supply chains, and agribusiness management.
Highlighting the human impact of this shift, CS Kagwe emphasised, "The jobs to be created will be real jobs with dignity. The food security we achieve will mean that no Kenyan goes to bed hungry."
The CS concluded that, "We have the strategy. We have the investment framework. We have the political will. What we need now is private sector action." Kenya is officially moving from strategy to collective action to secure total food sustainability and widespread economic prosperity.
Present were Governors Mutahi Kahiga, (Nyeri), Nathif J. Adam (Garissa), Joseph Ole Lenku, (Kajiado), Deputy Governor Dr. Mathew Ochieng among other key partners.
Other development partners present were World Bank Group, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), African Development Bank, Gates Foundation, the AGRA, U.S. Embassy Nairobi, Embassy of the Netherlands in Kenya, German Embassy Nairobi, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
CS Kagwe Flags Off Landmark $11.4 Billion AgriConnect Programme to Drive Agricultural Growth
Kagwe says pubblic-private partnership fundamentally changes the risk profile of agricultural lending.