Kenya plans to raise Ksh598 billion ($4.62 billion) to finance expansion of area under irrigation by one million acres in the next 10 years to increase food production.

In the 10-year plan under the National Irrigation Sector Investment Plan (NISIP), the government targets to fast-track public private partnerships, credit guaranteeing smallholder farmers and enhancing corporate agriculture.

State Department of Irrigation Principal Secretary Ephantus Kimotho, speaking to the media during a pre-launch on Thursday noted that increasing resources in the subsector will contribute to making the country food self-reliant and thus reduce food imports.

Kimotho explained that 39 per cent of the resources will be funded by government and development partners while 61 per cent will be funded mainly by the private sector.

“This strategy is geared towards investment in irrigation food and fodder production and will be guided by five investment pathways that will enable multiple financing sources and local initiatives strategically aligned with total focus on government goals”, he said.

Kimotho said the country had 747,000 acres under irrigation and that 83,000 acres of these were done in the past two years and that this had led to increased production, particularly rice value chain.

“We initially were doing 192,000 metric tonnes. Because of the additional acreage and irrigation, mostly in public schemes, the rice production has increased by 293,000 tonnes, an increase of 50 per cent,” he said.

“By 2027, we want to increase production to 440,000 metric tonnes and by 2032, one million metric tonnes.”

The PS noted that the Mwea irrigation scheme, at the moment, has increased from 25,000 acres to 35,000 acres and the government was doing double cropping and while ensuring that water was running, farmers were to take care of operational maintenance 100 per cent.

The government also plans to put 200,000 acres under irrigation in Galana-Kulalu despite perennial water shortage challenge. Kimotho said they will be working with aggregators who have been having a challenge of getting the right quality and quantity.

“This plan we are trying to come up with is a framework of how we can create a linkage between the aggregators and the farmers so that the farmers can get contract farming and as a result the farmers can be able to get guaranteed income,” he said.

Vincent Kabuti, the Irrigation Secretary at the Ministry of Water, Sanitation and Irrigation said the goal of the investment plan was to revolutionise irrigation while making sure that farmers increased their earnings.

“We also want to provide a good working environment for the private sector so that they can put private capital into the irrigation space,” he said.

He explained that out of the five pathways that will guide the investment plan, the first one is the farmer-led irrigation that targets farmer led 250,000 acres of land accessible to water sources and another 100,000 acres without water sources.

“For the farmer-led irrigation we are looking at farmers who have one acre to five acres to ten acres and facilitating them to acquire irrigation equipment that are more affordable,” he said.

Other pathways are high performance public irrigation schemes and focus on high levels of productivity by improving on governance and doing habitation to ensure possibility double crop, like 200% intensification.

Corporate agribusiness is yet another pathway that will ensure investors developed large tracts of land for commercial farming.

“We will leverage on their efficient mechanization to lower the cost of production and therefore avail affordable products to the economy thus bringing down the cost of living in the country,” Kabuti said.

“Irrigation will be revitalised in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands to ensure food and fodder production for vulnerable pastoralists communities where 2,000 small, owned, developed and farmers-managed irrigation schemes will be maximized,” added the Irrigation Secretary.

• A Tell Media / KNA report / By Wangari Ndirangu