Kenya's Potato Council Trains Village-Based Advisors to Bridge Farm-Level Business Gaps

Village-Based Advisors across Meru, Laikipia, Nyandarua and Nandi counties have just completed a new round of Training of Trainers (ToT) sessions — the latest step in rebuilding Kenya's potato extension network from the ground up. The National Potato Council of Kenya, in a statement, said it partnered with Twinkle and Sparkle Consulting to run the sessions, which fall under the ongoing rollout of NPCK's project work in these four counties, and brought together both experienced and newly recruited VBAs to serve as resource persons in their communities.

The choice to train trainers rather than farmers directly signals an extension model built on multiplication: a relatively small cohort of VBAs is meant to cascade knowledge outward to farmer groups, with NPCK providing continued technical support, mentorship and supervision. That structure only works if the initial training is broad enough to cover more than agronomy — and the curriculum described here goes well beyond crop technique.

The National Potato Council of Kenya reports that VBAs received practical training in financial literacy, bookkeeping, business planning, farmer health insurance, and identifying business opportunities within the potato value chain. This is notable because it treats farm enterprise management as a first-order extension topic alongside — rather than secondary to — technical potato-growing knowledge.

Participants also underwent refresher training on the Kenya Sustainable Potato Initiative (KSPI), reinforcing its objectives and the role VBAs play in implementing project activities at the grassroots level. Pairing a refresher on the overarching initiative with new business-skills content suggests NPCK is using these ToT sessions as both a knowledge update and an alignment exercise, keeping a dispersed advisor network working toward the same programme goals.

A distinct element of the sessions was the introduction of Viazi Soko, described as NPCK's digital potato marketing platform. VBAs were walked through how the platform connects farmers to markets and supports potato marketing and commercialization. Embedding a digital marketing tool inside a business-skills training curriculum ties the advisors' new bookkeeping and planning knowledge to an actual sales channel, rather than leaving those skills without a clear commercial outlet.

The National Potato Council of Kenya notes that sessions were highly interactive, giving participants room to exchange experiences, discuss farming challenges, and work through practical solutions together. In Laikipia County specifically, several discussions were conducted in the local language, which the source describes as creating a more inclusive learning environment and encouraging active participation.

That detail — a single county singled out for local-language delivery — implies the approach wasn't uniform across all four counties, and may reflect differences in participant comfort with the training's default working language rather than a programme-wide rule.

With the ToT sessions complete, VBAs are now expected to cascade the training to farmer groups in their respective areas, continuing under NPCK's technical support and mentorship. The Council frames this as reaffirming its commitment to building a network of community-based extension providers capable of supporting enterprise development and accelerating the Kenya Sustainable Potato Initiative.

The real test of this training round will come at the cascade stage — whether VBAs can translate financial literacy and bookkeeping concepts into formats farmer groups can readily adopt, and whether Viazi Soko sees increased farmer uptake as a downstream result of this training cycle.