Background
In 2011, The Dutch Government shifted focus to Agriculture and Food Security for her economic development support in Kenya. This eventually gave birth to the current support for aquaculture development under the Kenya Market-led Aquaculture Programme (KMAP), with funding from the Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands in Kenya (EKN).
KMAP is planned to build on past investments to create a sustainable aquaculture value chain (VC) supplied by 1,100 mid-scale commercial farmers initially. It continues to work on selected interventions along the whole VC, to increase productivity, market systems and the policy environment. KMAP is designed to provide direct assistance to farmers, feed producers and traders to improve production and market efficiency. This is envisaged to result in the development of a positive enabling environment for aquaculture, which KMAP will support by creating networks and enhancing active participation of farmers, input suppliers, traders, trade associations, government, research institutions and civil society in the aquaculture sector. The target project area includes the counties around Lake Victoria in Western Kenya and a few specific locations in Central/Eastern, near Nairobi.
The KMAP project is designed to address three major challenges in food production, nutrition and agriculture incomes in Kenya:
- Food insecurity: KMAP addresses this by increasing production of fish for home consumption and sales for at least 9,100 households through aquaculture. It continues to create the conditions and momentum needed to facilitate a sustainable aquaculture industry.
- Nutrition: By increasing the availability of fish, KMAP is contributing a new and affordable source of protein to at least 1.2 million people.
- Incomes: KMAP has adopted and is developing lessons learned from Farm Africa’s 3,500 farmers assisted through previous projects, and other initiatives in Kenya and around the world, to fully commercialize at least 1,100 aquaculture farmers and establish the foundation for a competitive industry based on many thousands of mid-size enterprises in the future. A further 8,000 is projected to benefit though smaller-scale production that will contribute to household food needs and provide intermittent income from sales of surpluses.
KMAP is contributing to the development of a sustainable aquaculture industry in Kenya by raising production levels to the tipping point needed for feed manufacturing to be commercially viable and to close the consumption gap. The project’s main hypothesis is that developing the aquaculture VC will make a significant contribution to rural development and food and nutrition security, while generating incomes and employment opportunities. It is projected to achieve this goal through implementation of strategic interventions in production, marketing and policy.