Hi-tech small-scale farming a viable path out of poverty

In the decades immediately after Independence, Kenyans had a very clear path that they could follow if they wanted to escape from poverty.

Education was central. The aspiration was generally towards earning the qualifications that would lead to a professional career.

But equally important was the willingness of families living on small-scale farms to apply themselves to the backbreaking work, which is what daily life consisted of for the majority of Kenyans who lived in rural areas.

For while government policy can create more jobs at various levels, when it comes to sustained prosperity, that is something a government can only facilitate. But it cannot shower prosperity on the citizens of the country.

So, the central question that I wish the various candidates for the presidency in the 2027 general election would answer, is this: Where is the path to prosperity that you, as a leader, can point to, that would enable Kenyans, through their own hard work, to rise from poverty into the middle class?

What makes this question urgent is that the old paths to prosperity are no longer valid. Partly as a result of rapid population growth leading to family farms being divided into ever-smaller individual plots; and also, partly due to global trends in agricultural production, all we ever hear about farming is that the harvests never justify the investment in labour and fertilisers.

There are exceptions, of course: tea (definitely), coffee (maybe), avocado (apparently). But in general, the Kenyan small-scale farmer is a poor man or woman.

As for education, if you had told me back in the 1990s that a day was soon coming when Kenya would have a huge surplus of university graduates (including in the elite professions like medicine, engineering, law, architecture, etc), I would have laughed out loud.

Nobody is laughing now: not parents who sacrificed to see their children get a university education, nor the freshly minted university graduates.

All this reminds me of a conference I attended many years ago, at a time when trips to Europe were easily available to journalists from all over Africa.

Some West Africans I was talking to were quoting the iconic pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah and arguing that Africa needed to urgently industrialise. (Incidentally, did you know that this giant of African liberation movements gave himself that name by which we all know him, Kwame Nkrumah, and that he was actually born “Francis Nwia Kofi Ngonloma”?)

It so happened that on a previous trip to Europe, barely a month earlier, the group I was part of was taken to see what a hi-tech small-scale farm looked like. The tools the farmer used to till his land were not the “jembe” that Kenyan farmers use. It was a small computer-controlled “driverless tractor”, supported by a drone that flew overhead to identify the places where the tractor needed to do all the things which Kenyan farmers do with their own hands.

If you had seen this man working on his laptop, in his air-conditioned office, and not seen what was going on outside, you would never have guessed that he was a farmer. He may as well have been a computer programmer or an engineer.

With this recent experience still very much on my mind, I told my West African friends that, as far as I was concerned, what our continent needed more than anything else was for our leaders to identify cash crops that could be grown on a small family farm, and which were potentially profitable enough to justify the use of the kind of advanced technology I had seen that European farmer apply.

My point was that insofar as most African countries were nations largely populated by poor farmers, with little realistic prospect of millions of manufacturing jobs being created on the continent, profitable farming was the only viable path to prosperity for the majority of citizens.

You may well say that it is a pipe dream to imagine African small-scale farmers using computer-controlled farming equipment.

However, I would then remind you that when smartphones first became widely available, there were many who said that these devices were far too sophisticated to be used by poor people, presumably including African farmers.

Long-term economic projects are not easy to explain in layman’s terms, and are never immediately visible

In time, economic reality always catches up with them