Kenya's Potato Council Lays Out a Five-Pillar Plan to Fix Market Chaos and Fund Itself

Kenya's potato value chain runs from smallholder farmers to marketers with no natural alignment of interests, and the National Potato Council of Kenya explains that part of its mandate is to coordinate this fragmented membership and build partnerships across that chain. The Council describes itself as a forum where industry players can negotiate, plan, lobby, and advocate for their specific interests while charting a common direction. That framing matters because it signals NPCK is positioning itself less as a regulator and more as a convener, relying on stakeholder analysis, sensitization, and multi-stakeholder forums to build what it calls an environment of trust and partnership among players who don't automatically share incentives.

The Council's own account of Kenya's potato market is blunt about its dysfunction. Potato prices vary by region, and farmers regularly compare notes unfavorably with growers elsewhere, a gap NPCK attributes mainly to differing target markets and seasonality rather than any single unfair actor. Compounding that, the Council states that poor pre- and post-harvest handling means tubers of mixed varieties, sizes, and condition — including cut or rotten potatoes — often end up packaged together in the same sack, undermining quality at the point of sale.

Transportation is identified as a second structural drag: most potato-growing areas have poor feeder roads, some impassable, driving up transaction costs and cutting into farmer profitability. NPCK's proposed fix is a more organized marketing structure, including minimum gate prices, collection centres, a warehouse receipting system, and standardized sorting, packaging, and branding intended to also improve competitiveness in regional and global markets.

NPCK frames information and communication as a growth strategy in its own right, arguing that industry competitiveness now depends on how well relevant data reaches the right users. The Council's plans include producing publications — banners, magazines, pamphlets, calendars, manuals, and booklets — alongside print, electronic, and internet channels through its website. More operationally significant is the stated intent to computerize information on seed and ware potato production and marketing, effectively building a seed production and distribution strategy for the industry, and to introduce mobile phone-based marketing services for both seed and ware potatoes.

NPCK treats entrepreneurship as central to its own sustainability, and lists specific income-generating activities it intends to pursue: operating potato collection, storage, and information centres at a premium; producing and supplying branded low-cost standard potato bags; negotiating for the right to collect cess and levies on potatoes; and charging fees for seed potato inspection services (pending authorization by KEPHIS) and pesticide efficacy trials (pending authorization by PCPB). The Council also credits the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, KALRO, GIZ, and KENAFF as instrumental to its progress so far, and says it plans to keep building both existing and new development partnerships.

Beyond market mechanics, NPCK identifies HIV and AIDS, gender, climate change, and youth empowerment as cross-cutting issues it intends to mainstream across its programmes. Concretely, that means developing a gender policy for its own membership and Secretariat, a Youth, Gender, HIV, and AIDS policy, and a climate change adaptation strategy for the potato industry, alongside programmes meant to draw young people into the sector and create employment for them.