Agriculture CS Mutahi Kagwe speaking at the National Agriconnect Compact 2025-2030/HANDOUT
Agriculture CS Mutahi Kagwe on Wednesday officially unveiled the Kenya AgriConnect Compact (2025–2030).
The Sh1.4 trillion ($11.4 billion) AgriConnect Compact initiative seeks to revolutionise the agriculture sector and create over 2.3 million jobs by 2030.
The bold national agricultural transformation initiative is engineered to shift the sector from subsistence farming into a modern, high-tech, and commercially viable economic powerhouse.
"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," Kagwe said.
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, the government is committing Sh392 billion ($3.8 billion) in catalytic public funds, strategically structured to de-risk the sector and crowd in a massive USD 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 explained.
By leveraging public-private partnerships, blended 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 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.
These market reforms are aggressively targeted at slashing costly imports of food staples like rice and maize by 50 per cent, while driving a 60 per cent surge in high-value exports to global markets.
Most importantly, this market-driven growth is directly tied to solving the nation's employment crisis.
The 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.
"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 technical groundwork is complete, backed by strong political will, the National Treasury, the Council of Governors, and international development partners.
"We have the strategy. We have the investment framework. We have the political will. What we need now is private sector action," Kagwe said.
Kenya is officially moving from strategy to collective action to secure total food sustainability and widespread economic prosperity.
