The Capacity Building Component

The Fund also has a component for strengthening agriculture & agribusiness private sector organizations. This aims to address the capacity building needs required by the farmers/primary producers who constitute a major private sector stakeholder in the agricultural sector. The entry point for interventions to enhance the capacity of this category of stakeholder has been identified as the farmer/producer member associations/commodity associations. Most of these associations are still in their formative stages in terms of the various dynamics. They have no technical or financial capacity to meet expectations from their members and potential members or carry out their enhanced roles as spelt out in the SRA.

There is a critical need for support of these associations for various reasons; which include, among others:

• The policy and institutional reforms proposed in the SRA and the Kenya Vision 2030 are expected to lead to increased & more challenging roles for the member associations.

• Globalization has led to costly, competitive and very dynamic market entry requirements which favour the better-resourced and organized firms.

• The goal of "Doing Agriculture as a Business" will be more easily attained if the key sector players are empowered enough, to be able to facilitate development of more competitive value chains.

In agricultural regimes that are dominated by smallholder farmers, Government has a key role to play in building the capacity of the private sector stakeholders. This is for various reasons, among them; the fact that agribusiness firms prefer to set up value chain linkages with large farmers or organized small farmers. Government has therefore, a facilitative role in development of the value chains in small scale agriculture to make them competitive. This will promote establishment of market responsive sector/industry associations.