NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 10 — Kenya has spent decades becoming good at producing what the world wants.

📻 Breaking It Down

Its farmers grow some of the world’s most sought-after tea and coffee, its horticulture industry supplies European markets with flowers and fresh produce, its livestock sector provides raw materials for leather, while its soil contains minerals increasingly valuable to global industry.

Yet there is a persistent weakness in this success story: Kenya often earns from the first stage of the value chain and leaves the more lucrative stages to other countries.

Tea is grown here, coffee is produced here and hides are collected here. But processing, branding, packaging and manufacturing — activities that can multiply the value of those commodities — frequently happen elsewhere.

📌 What You Need to Know

Kenya’s next economic challenge, therefore, should not simply be to export more, but to capture more value from what it already produces.

The argument comes at a critical time. Kenya’s domestic exports increased from Sh932.2 billion in 2024 to Sh967.9 billion in 2025, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. But imports reached Sh2.77 trillion, leaving the country with a merchandise trade deficit of about Sh1.65 trillion.

The figures illustrate the structural problem: Kenya participates actively in international trade, but much of the value it consumes is manufactured elsewhere while some of the raw materials it produces are transformed elsewhere.

Economist David King’ong’o argues that agriculture provides the clearest opportunity to change this equation.

Kenya’s agriculture sector contributes about 17 per cent of GDP, he said, but that contribution could rise substantially if the country processed more of its agricultural produce locally.

“If the gap for processing or value addition is bridged and raw products are not exported for processing elsewhere, the contribution to GDP would double to around 40–45 per cent if processing was done locally.”

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya