The transformative impact of research and innovations in Kenya Agtech Ecosystem

Kenya consistently imports more than USD 1.1 billion worth of food each yearIn the year 2022 alone, Kenya experienced a rise in food imports, jumping from 13.4% to 15.5%. This heavy reliance on imported food, coupled with climate-change-related issues, poses significant obstacles to Kenya's food security and economic and agricultural development.

In response, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and the CGIAR Accelerate for Impact Platform (A4IP) have partnered to launch the AgriTech4Kenya Innovation Challenge. The challenge aims to transform Kenya’s agrifood systems by supporting the development, deployment, and adoption of effective, high-impact science-based agritech solutions that are context-specific, beneficiary-centered, and market-ready to unlock Kenya's potential in line with Vision 2030 and the Bottoms Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA). 

Briter Bridges has partnered CIAT and CGIAR A4IP to share data and intelligence from its AgBase programme as well as to host the agritech solutions emerging from the challenge on the (soon to be released) platform. 

As part of this partnership, Briter presented The transformative impact of research and innovations in Kenya Agtech at the AgriTech4Kenya Consultation Workshop and Launch event in Nairobi Kenya in April. This event brought together public, private and research organisations to develop applicable solutions to enable and scale human-centric agritech solutions. Currently, the Kenyan agritech ecosystem faces multifaceted challenges that need to be tackled through collaboration from stakeholders in policy space, research support, innovators, investors, farmers, and agri experts. 

The key themes that appeared repeatedly were the need for patient capital that allows for the iteration of solutions, mentorship to scale innovations into viable businesses, and human-centric solution development tailored and usable by end users.

The keynote presentation drew on over 10 years of data on the agri-food tech ecosystem in Kenya from the AgBase platform. It highlighted 5 key insights: