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We partner with Kenyan farmers to build sustainable futures through resources, training and community values.
Kenya’s economy relies heavily on farming, but it faces many challenges. After recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, the country was significantly impacted by the 2023 drought in the Horn of Africa, which left 4.4 million people facing severe food shortages and approximately 1.1 million women and children suffering from acute malnutrition.
Farming makes up more than one-third of Kenya’s gross domestic product and employs more than 70 percent of the rural population. However, problems such as low productivity, lack of access to finance and poor infrastructure make it hard for farmers to succeed. Animal diseases further compound challenges by reducing livestock productivity and increasing mortality rates. Additionally, youth unemployment and economic vulnerability contribute to approximately 35 percent of Kenyans living in poverty. Climate change exacerbates these challenges, as erratic rainfall patterns disrupt traditional farming practices and push farmers to seek more stable livelihoods elsewhere.
Heifer Kenya supports smallholder farmers by providing livestock, seeds, tools and market access. Key strategies include strengthening agricultural cooperatives and supporting farmer-owned businesses so farmers can share resources and ideas to improve collective bargaining power, reduce costs and improve their enterprises.
Partnering with governments and the private sector secures essential resources and services for farmers to invest in their operations. Our approach focuses on engaging youth, promoting digital agriculture and working with communities to foster shared goals and values. Farmers receive training in modern techniques and gain access to financial services that help them build strong market systems for long-term success.
Our primary objective is helping families achieve a sustainable living income, our measure for the amount of money required for a decent life — including safe shelter, nutritious food, clothing, education and health care — while also reaching additional benchmarks for economic and climate resilience.
Beef Cattle
Dairy
Horticulture
Poultry
Year Heifer launched in Kenya
Household participants in 2024
Household participants to date
Heifer International’s work is organized at the country level into Signature Programs focused on large-scale, measurable and sustainable impact achieved by building partnerships at all levels. Each program supports farmers through time-bound projects designed to increase their household income.
Heifer Kenya’s Signature Program, Practice for Change (P4C), aims to help 625,000 households achieve a sustainable living income by 2030 through the transformation of agricultural value chains, including beef, dairy, poultry and horticulture.
The AYuTe Africa Challenge Kenya is an annual national competition that awards cash grants to Kenya agritech innovators with ideas to transform farming and food production. The national competition is part of a regional program, AYuTe Africa NextGen, which supports young African entrepreneurs in developing solutions to address smallholder farmers’ challenges, providing necessary incubation and financing to drive agribusiness innovation across the continent. Since its launch in 2022, the project has trained more than 230 young entrepreneurs and awarded $40,000 to help them grow their businesses.
The Kenya Livestock Marketing and Resilience Project (KLMP) promotes the food production and livelihood resilience of 38,000 smallholder farming households by working with digital service providers, governments, cooperatives and technical experts to increase access to technology, training and technical assistance for poultry and beef production and marketing.
The project also works to strengthen the poultry and beef value chains in favor of smallholder farmers by enhancing business capacities of farmer-owned agribusinesses and facilitating access to profitable markets, affordable financing and insurance to improve infrastructure, reduce risks and maximize profits.
To address the low agricultural mechanization within Africa, Heifer and its partners like Hello Tractor are increasing farmers access to technology and machinery to improve productivity and their incomes. This document outlines the challenges farmers face, solutions and impacts of increasing mechanization in countries such as Nigeria and Kenya.
