Rome – 24 March - With nearly 2.4 million poor people in Kenya’s rural communities struggling to get enough to eat, Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), arrives in Nairobi on 26 March to offer his agency’s support. 

Nwanze’s visit follows the release earlier this month of a report by the Kenyan government and international partners pointing to a rapid decline in food security among some agricultural households.
The number of people needing food and other assistance spiked by 50 per cent in just six months, according to the study by the Kenya Food Security Steering Group. The number of hungry people jumped from 1.6 million in August 2010 to 2.4 million in February 2011. The cause was the recent drought in the northern and northeastern pastoral areas and the southeastern and coastal lowlands.

Their plight highlights the urgency of boosting the incomes of smallholder farmers and rural entrepreneurs and better equipping them to manage risks. This will enable them to both feed their families and contribute to economic growth and food security in Kenya.

New opportunities for investors
Changing agricultural markets are opening new opportunities for business success in rural areas, IFAD has noted. It calls for more investment to help rural people deal with food price volatility, risks posed by severe weather (such as the drought faced by so many Kenyans today), long-term uncertainties due to climate change and various natural resource constraints.

These are among the issues Nwanze will underline while in Kenya. He will meet with the Ministers of Finance and Agriculture to discuss how his agency can help to coordinate the efforts of the Government, the private sector and aid agencies. The priority is to bridge widening household food gaps while protecting livelihoods. 

He will also visit projects IFAD is supporting in the central and eastern parts of the country. These are helping to improve rural livelihoods, especially among women, and stem the rapid degradation of the resources crucial to rural livelihoods. 

Helping the landless
Nwanze will visit Kiumbu, Kirinyaga, Rukanga and Gathanje in Central Province. There an IFAD-supported project is working to improve living conditions among the area’s poorest people, particularly landless people and women-headed households.

Project activities are centred in the arid and semi-arid lands in the districts of Kirinyaga, Maragwa, Nyandarua, Nyeri and Thika. Cofinanced with a grant from the Belgian Fund for Food Security, the project seeks to raise food production and income. It also aims to reduce disease through improved health care, sanitation and safe water.

While in the area, Nwanze will inaugurate a new maternity facility, a borehole and a water treatment plant built with project funds.

He will also review the progress of an initiative on Mount Kenya. It addresses rising poverty linked to deterioration of natural resources, particularly water, related to poor agricultural practices. Small landholders are facing falling productivity due to a cycle of drought and flooding and theeffects of unregulated use of water from rivers.

The project, cofinanced with a grant from the Global Environment Facility, works with community groups. The objective is to boost their skills to formulate and implement plans to sustainably manage land and water resources. Another aim is to reduce conflicts between people and wildlife in an area with strong tourism potential.

Three million seedlings on Mount Kenya
A massive reforestation and anti-erosion effort on Mount Kenya is also under way with IFAD support. Three million seedlings are being planted, mainly by local residents. They are also deriving some income by raising seedlings of indigenous species. About 200,000 have been planted to help stabilize slopes along over 150 kilometers of riverbank.

With the Government and other stakeholders, IFAD is developing an initiative that would scale up the activities to cover more of the catchments of the Upper Tana River.

The project has also enlisted nearly 900 local schools to encourage a conservation ethic among young people. Students receive seedlings to plant on their family farms.

Water user associations are galvanizing community action around sustainable management of scarce water in the project area. Communities are also engaging in ecosystem-friendly projects to earn income while reducing the pressure on fragile natural resources.

Better practices, higher yields
The project has also helped raise yields by introducing improved technologies and farming practices and organizing rural groups into community and financial associations.

Nwanze will also visit projects run by Africa Harvest, an organization that promotes science and technology to improve productivity among Africa’s farmers, and the Greenbelt Movement, which plants trees on public land, degraded forest areas and private farms.

Since 1979 IFAD has invested a total of US$214.5 million to support Kenyan Government efforts to reduce rural poverty. Investments include US$18 million in grants under the Belgian Fund for Food Security and US$4.7 million from the Global Environment Facility.

IFAD has also mobilized additional cofinancing of about US$68 million from other donors. The Government of Kenya and project participants have contributed about US$56.0 million and US$11.0 million respectively. 

Since 2008 IFAD has managed its Kenya operations from an office in Nairobi, which also serves as a regional hub.

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Press release No.: IFAD/22/2011
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) works with poor rural people to enable them to grow and sell more food, increase their incomes and determine the direction of their own lives. Since 1978, IFAD has invested over US$12.5 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries, empowering more than 370 million people to break out of poverty. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized UN agency based in Rome – the United Nation’s food and agricultural hub. It is a unique partnership of 166 members from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), other developing countries and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).