There was a time when a farmer in Kenya could expect a visit from an extension officer who knew their livestock, crop and animal diseases, management regimes, soil types and environmental degradation. In some cases the trained extension officers would advise on weather patterns for a specific commodity.
That relationship between the farmer and the person carrying out research in the laboratory and the field was one of the quiet strengths of Kenyan agriculture. It is a strength we have allowed to erode, and I believe it is time we admitted that plainly and did something about it.
I was recently part of a delegation of a few Kenyan university Vice Chancellors who met with a visiting team from the United States’ National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA). The conversation was candid, and it left me thinking hard about where our extension system went wrong, and where our universities fit into fixing it.
I remember with nostalgia the vibrant departments of Agricultural Economics and Extension Services across many universities whose enrolment capacities was always full.
The facts are not in dispute. Agriculture remains the backbone of our economy, yet the machinery that once moved knowledge from research institutions to the farm has fallen apart.
When agriculture was devolved in 2013, the intention was to bring services closer to the people. In practice, it fragmented what used to be a coordinated national effort. Counties inherited responsibility for extension without always inheriting the capacity, the budgets or the technical partnerships needed to deliver it.
Extension officers’ where available today are too few, too stretched, and too often without the transport or tools to reach the farmers who need them. Essentially, their roles are not visible.
What struck me in our discussions with the American delegation was not any new suggestion that Kenya starts from zero.
We have a history of extension work, decades of institutional memory, and universities with genuine research depth in crop science, animal health, soil management, environmental degradation, and agribusiness.
What we lack is the connective tissue – the deliberate architecture that gets that knowledge out of the seminar room and onto the farm. We have enough research extension materials to serve our country credibly.
The team from the US praised, understandably, their own land-grant university tradition, where teaching, research and extension are treated as a single continuous function rather than three separate activities competing for attention and funding.
I do not think we should import that model wholesale. Kenya’s counties, our university system, and our farming communities have their own character, and any solution must be built with that in mind, not simply borrowed.
But the underlying principle is sound and worth taking seriously: universities should not be islands of research divorced from the communities whose problems that research is meant to solve.
The few Vice Chancellors who attended the meeting noted with concern the vital role that extension services could play in food security in Kenya. This would also enhance employability of our graduates from universities.
This is why I believe the proposal now on the table – a partnership linking county governments, universities and industry in what has been called a “triple-helix” approach – deserves serious consideration.
Counties bring local coordination and policy authority. Universities bring research and training capacity. Industry brings resources and practical, market-tested expertise. None of these three can rebuild extension alone. Together, there is a real chance of building something durable.
It also matters that this conversation is happening at a moment when Parliament has just passed the Agricultural and Livestock Extension Services Bill, aimed precisely at giving the country a more coordinated, technology-driven and farmer-centred extension system.
Legislation alone does not train a single extension officer or reach a single farmer, but it gives us a framework to build on, and it signals that the political will Mr Ted McKinney, the group team leader, of NASDA rightly noted would be necessary is beginning to gather.
Partnership, at its best, is a two-way exchange. Kenya’s extension system will be shaped by Kenyan farmers, counties and institutions, and it is because ownership rests here that international collaboration can be so valuable.
Partners like NASDA bring practical experience from their own context, and their willingness to learn alongside us, as much as to share what has worked elsewhere, is what makes this a partnership of equals.
Set alongside our own local knowledge, those insights can help us build a system that truly serves our farmers. This approach is one of the low hanging panacea in food security.
Our Vice-Chancellors, especially those who have Faculties or Schools of Agriculture, have a responsibility here that goes beyond hosting delegations and signing communiqués.
If our universities are to be genuine partners in reviving extension services, we must be prepared to send our researchers into the counties, to design curricula that will produce graduates who understand extension work as a vocation and not an afterthought, to open up real job opportunities for fresh graduates in extension, agribusiness and agri-enterprise, so that young people leave our campuses with prospects while farmers gain the support they need, and to measure our own success not only in publications but in whether a smallholder farmer in Tharaka, Nyamira, Bungoma or Kwale can access the knowledge our institutions generate.
We used to get this right, and I believe we can get it right again.
Let us draw the best lessons from friends and partners abroad, adapt them to Kenya’s own realities, and build on the strengths we already have, so that we finally achieve the coordinated interaction between research and the farm that we have needed for a generation. This approach will be part of food security assurances.