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Agriculture and Food Systems
Value-Chain Diagnostics
Evidence on where Kenya's priority value chains lose value, and which policy, regulatory and investment changes would raise output, margins and jobs.
- Sector
- Agriculture and Food Systems
- Typical timeline
- 10 to 14 weeks
- Delivery
- Onsite or virtual
- Deliverables
- 6
The problem
The Fourth Medium Term Plan 2023-2027 commits government to raise output per unit across priority value chains, and the Ministry places tea, coffee, rice, sugar, dairy, horticulture, nuts, cotton and edible oils at the centre of the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda. Counties are choosing their own priorities in parallel: under the National Agricultural Value Chain Development Project each participating county selects up to five value chains. Public money follows these choices, yet many are made without a current account of where value is lost between farm gate and final market.
The rules are also moving. The Sugar Act, 2024 and the Coffee Act, 2026 reset licensing, levies and marketing channels, while the Crops Act, 2013 continues to govern other scheduled crops and counties may levy their own crop fees. Export buyers now demand traceability to the farm. A credible diagnostic must read regulation alongside agronomy, finance and logistics, and price the bottlenecks that investment or reform can actually remove.
Policy anchors
- Fourth Medium Term Plan 2023-2027
- Agricultural Sector Transformation and Growth Strategy 2019-2029
- National Agricultural Value Chain Development Project
- Coffee Act, 2026
- Sugar Act, 2024
How we work
Scope and prioritise
We agree the value chains and geography with the client, screening candidates against national and county priorities, market demand and the producer base.
Map the chain
We map actors, volumes, prices and margins from input supply to final market, drawing on producer, aggregator and processor interviews and administrative data.
Read the rules
We review the licensing, levies, standards and marketing rules that apply at each node, including county fees and commodity board requirements.
Diagnose and cost bottlenecks
We rank constraints in finance, infrastructure, regulation and producer organisation by their effect on output and farm-gate prices, and estimate the cost of removing each.
Set out options
We present sequenced policy and investment options with responsible institutions and indicators, and validate them with value-chain actors.
- Value-chain maps with price and margin structure
- Regulatory and levy review for each chain
- Ranked bottleneck analysis with cost estimates
- Sequenced investment and policy reform options
- Validation workshop report
- Indicator set for tracking reform and investment results
Ministries, county departments of agriculture, commodity boards, development partners and investors deciding where to commit public or private money in a value chain.
Questions clients ask
Can one diagnostic cover several value chains?
Yes. We compare candidate chains on a common framework so that a county or programme can rank them, then go deeper on those it selects. This mirrors how the National Agricultural Value Chain Development Project asks counties to choose a limited set.
How do you handle commodities that have just changed regulator?
We read the new statute and any regulations still in force side by side and flag where obligations overlap or are unclear. The Coffee Act, 2026, for example, took effect without expressly repealing the 2019 coffee regulations, which matters for licensing decisions.
Do you collect primary data?
Where administrative data is thin, we run structured interviews and short surveys with producers, aggregators and processors. The scale is set with the client to match the decision at hand.