As we approach the televised debating period among presidential candidates in the upcoming general election in Kenya, I suggest a few focus areas that have the potential to address many of the ills that keep us poor, or contribute to our income disparities:
1. Contributors to GDP:
Kenya’s GDP, as at 2015, stood at 63.4 billion USD (Per capita GDP of $1,587), 68 times bigger than at independence (926.6 million USD) in 1963. The fastest growth happened from 1993 (5.752 billion USD). Our key contributing sectors, currently, are tourism, telecommunications, transport, construction and a recovering agricultural production.
In this day and age, other than in telecommunications, we are not exploiting other technology arenas, most notably the online work/BoP space. Imagine, for example, an army of 1,000 ICT-savvy young people in every county, each earning Shs 40,000 per month from online work (typing, programming, translation, video captioning, etc). In 2002, I experimented with working online. With an account at Upwork.com (then elance.com), we earned a total of about Shs 3.6 million through the year. Our average hourly billing was about $27 per hour. $27 an hour (27 x 8 hours x 100 to convert to KShs = a salary of Shs 21,600 per day) is good money. Even allowing for rest and work-drought periods, a skilled online worker can comfortably earn Shs 100,000 monthly.
But, factoring extra caution, let’s work with Shs 40,000 per month x 1,000 ICT-savvy boys and girls x 47 counties x 12 months = 22.56 billion, nearly half of the tea industry’s second payment of Shs 44.72 billion (2015/16, KTDA) paid out to 560,000 farmers!
The global BoP turnover (online work, call centres, et al), currently stands at $1.47 Trillion (World Bank, 2015)! And we are not playing in the field. So, here is the question you should ask the Presidential candidates during the upcoming debates: “What is your strategy for tapping into the ICT work space internationally?
2. Mechanization of agriculture
We produce maize at a cost way much higher than the world market price! Then we lose most of it in post-harvest hazards. That is why we constantly have to talk about protecting our farmers from imports. And that is how we are never able to build-up our reserves and have to resort to importing when drought or other calamity comes knocking.
We must mechanize agricultural production. There are motorized hand-pushed ploughs and seeders; There are small mechanized harvesters, drip lines, solar water pumps, air-tight storage bags/silos… Why are they not here? Because our farmers have not seen them.
People copy what they see. An Organization I am involved with, Africa Action Help International (actionafricahelp.org) demonstrated the growing of vegetables with drip irrigation in Kakuma on only one farm. Now the practice is catching up! We also demonstrated storage of animal fodder in Maasai land through fencing of paddocks and the community immediately embraced the practice. Right now, I am working with some NGOs to expand this space, demonstrating technologies such as soil inoculation, precision farming and mechanization. And it is bearing fruit.
Ask your candidates how they plan to mechanize and improve the competitiveness of our small scale, farmers, currently practicing subsistence farming at higher than market costs.
3. Export dry vegetables
While we lose heavily each year in respect to spoilage of fresh vegetables on transit to international markets, we are hardly tapping the growing global demand for dry vegetables, which now stands at over $1 billion. This market is growing progressively as industrialized countries develop more end uses in the quest for natural sources of nutrients.
I also play in this space, albeit in a small way, and I can tell you this: a vegetable, in dry form, weighs as little as 15 times the weight of a fresh leaf, stores much longer (years) and is easier to handle logistics-wise. Compared to other vegetable growing regions, notably China and Eastern Europe, we don’t have to worry about winter; we can grow and dry vegetables all year round!
What do we need? Dryers (can be solar; sun; green-house; hot water heated), access to international market, and compliance to international quality requirements. Doable.
So, does your presidential candidate have a plan for promoting this sector?
4. Double our coffee yields
We currently produce about 40,000 metric tons of coffee, down from around 130,000 metric tons produced in 1977/8. Several reasons have been cited for the downward trend (towards the death of our coffee industry), including poor pricing due to lack of value addition, better returns from real estate – so farmers uproot coffee to build houses to corruption in the co-operative sector).
The big question, however, is this: how is it that we can allow a big earner such as coffee to simply die?
There are things we can do, short-term and long-term. Focusing on yield-per-tree increases, for example: When my wife and I relocated upcountry, our yield-per-coffee tree was less than one kg per annum. In two years, focusing on manuring, proper pruning and attending to coffee diseases, we have grown it about 5 kg. Our extension service adviser, my uncle, tells me that next year we will exceed the 10 kg per plant, and by the fourth year, most likely achieve the optimal 30kg per plant.
I don’t have space and time here to discuss value addition in detail, but I can tell you briefly that direct exports of green beans to roasters (instead of trying to directly access the supermarket space in the USA and Europe) is easily achievable, and it alone can nearly double our net returns. I have piloted it, and can tell you, yes, it is doable.
So, what is your presidential candidate doing to protect our coffee exports, and extending production to the regions where coffee does not have to compete with real estate, such as Western Kenya, Upper West Pokot?
5. Growing maize, and other grains (beans, pulses, wheat):
We (and our animals) eat 3,800 million metric tons of maize, and our appetite for the crop we can never grow enough of is growing by the year. So (projecting growing demand), let’s work with 50 million bags. Planning with a conservative output of 10 bags an acre through commercial, mechanized production, that would mean opening up 5,000,000 acres of land. We can find that the land – not in Central or the Great Rift, however. There are vasts amounts of Garsen-like land in marginalized areas like West Pokot and Garissa. Without rent-seeking (oh, the losses we suffer from corruption!), I am sure we can attract 1,000 large scale investors to farm 5,000 acres each. Local investors and international investors. All growing grain for our strategic reserves.
My reality check on grains happened one day when I was hosting a “small-scale” American farmer. Dressed in Jeans and comfortably eating the samosa’s my wife had prepared, he explained to me, upon my asking, how he did his farming: opening up 3,000 farmers at a time; raising 10,000 head of cattle on silage and hay. His production cost of a 90 kg bag equivalent, then was around Shs 90 when ours was Shs 1,800. His turnover: Bigger than my county, at the time. I have since met other, bigger farmers who would gladly invest in Kenya if they were assured of corruption-free leases for land.
Well, how about fronting these questions, among others, in the upcoming debates?
My question for presidential candidates: how do you intend to work with county governments and investors to open up land to grow grains for our strategic reserves.
Haron Wachira 