Invest in our women farmers to achieve sustainable growth
Opinion
By
Muthoni Ngure
| Mar 14, 2026
Women farmers drive Kenya’s agriculture and sustain communities across the country. [iStockphoto]
Walk through nearly any market in Kenya on a weekday morning and you will see who is feeding this country. Women arranging dry beans and maize before sunrise, loading sukuma wiki onto handcarts, and haggling over tomato prices with traders.
They are not a footnote to Kenya’s agricultural economy. They are, for the most part, the agricultural economy. And they have been systematically underserved by the very systems meant to support them. Kenya is a signatory to the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, known as CAADP, the African Union’s framework for agricultural investment and growth. Under the programme, Kenya has committed to achieving 6 per cent annual agricultural growth.
The 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey found that 75 per cent of women in Kenya own no agricultural land, whether solely or jointly, and only 3 per cent hold an individual title deed. In 2014, the equivalent figure was 61 per cent. By 2022, it had risen to 75 per cent. That is not progress. The National Land Commission made women’s land rights a centrepiece of its 2024 strategic direction, a signal that the issue has institutional attention at the highest level.
The Kenya Land Alliance’s most recent audit found that county community land registers still contain no gender-disaggregated data, which means that even as commitment grows, the country lacks the baseline measurement needed to track whether things are actually changing on the ground. Land is the collateral that determines whether a bank will talk to you and the security that makes it rational to invest in improving your soil rather than simply surviving the season. Without it, a farmer makes decisions shaped more by what she cannot afford to lose than by what she might be able to produce, and that difference shows up in her yields, in how much seed she buys, and in whether she plants for the market or just to get through to the next harvest.
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Agriculture contributes 21.3 per cent of GDP directly, closer to 30 per cent when you count the industries that depend on it, and employs roughly 32 per cent of the workforce (World Bank and KNBS, 2023). And yet Kenya spent close to Sh80.2 billion importing food in the first quarter of 2023 alone, nearly matching what it earned from food exports in the same period.
The FAO’s State of Food and Agriculture 2010–11 put a number to what that something is: if women farmers had equal access to productive resources, yields on their farms could rise by 20 to 30 per cent, with total agricultural output across developing countries lifting by 2.5 to 4 per cent. The question is why that potential has not translated into output, and the answer is not simply a lack of investment. Kenya has been investing. In the larger East African region, women producers are also central to the informal cross-border trade that keeps East Africa’s food supply moving during shortages, but that role has never attracted the investment or infrastructure that would allow them to operate at a greater scale.
The work being done by development organisations, government agencies and farmer cooperatives across the country is real and it is building something worth. The next step is making sure that momentum reaches the farmers who have so far been hardest to reach, not through a separate programme for women, but by treating equitable reach as a design requirement in every investment that touches smallholder agriculture, whether that is a credit facility, a land documentation drive, or an extension service measuring yield change rather than workshop attendance.