Kenya Cashew Nut Initiative

The Kenya Cashew Nut Initiative (KCNI) is a project within the Agriculture theme. Promoted by Agri Advance, which describes itself as a division of GDI Africa, it proposes to raise the incomes of the coast’s cashew farmers by collecting their nuts through village centres, recording sales digitally with M-PESA payments, certifying the crop as “Kenya Cashew”, and linking farmers to processors under off-take agreements. It seeks US$215,000 for a 12-month pilot in Kilifi County with 1,200 farmers in 48 groups and 12 village collection centres, which the infobox converts to about KES 27.8 million at KES 129.50 to the dollar.¹² As of October 2026 it is an unfunded proposal known from its two-page brief, and it sits beside a national effort to revive the cashew sector announced in January 2026.

What it is

The brief describes a “hub and spoke aggregation model”. Village Collection Centres in areas with many cashew trees would collect, grade and store nuts to a standard and feed them into larger Processor Collection Centres. A digital traceability tool would register farmers and record transactions, integrated with M-PESA, aiming at 80 per cent end-to-end traceability. A “Kenya Cashew” certification standard would be enforced through batch tracking and quality control. Off-take agreements would connect farmers to processors, “led by Nuts & More”, with supply aggregated for export to the European Union and the Middle East.

The pilot in Kilifi County would cover 1,200 farmers organised in 48 groups and 12 Village Collection Centres over 12 months, and the brief presents it as a model to be repeated across six coastal counties and in other Kenyan value chains. It projects 1,920 to 3,840 jobs within two years of implementation, a farm-gate price rise “via traceability” from KSh 50 to more than KSh 60 per kg, or about 20 per cent more income per kilo, and a shift by farmers from barter for cooking oil and flour to cash, building M-PESA records and opening bank and SACCO accounts. It adds that the collection centres would remain as permanent assets that could aggregate other crops. The cost of the pilot works out at about US$179 per farmer, this page’s arithmetic.

The legal framework already provides for much of this model. The Crops (Nuts and Oil Crops) Regulations, 2020 let the Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA) run a traceability system for nuts, provide that commercial buying from smallholders may be done at collection centres “for purposes of traceability”, and allow those centres to be owned or managed by county governments, growers’ associations, dealers or processors.³

Rationale

The brief’s case is that cashew could transform farmers’ incomes on the coast but that they “earn a fraction of the crop’s value”. It says some 70,000 smallholders grow the crop, 59 per cent of them women, with about 2 million trees, that they are held back by ageing trees, barter and “exploitative middlemen”, and that Kilifi County has untapped land in the agro-ecological zone suited to cashew. It sets Africa’s share of world raw cashew production, 61 per cent, against its share of processing, 12 per cent, and says Kenya produces under 10,000 tonnes a year against a processing capacity of 38,000 tonnes. It adds that global prices for raw nuts rose 60 per cent in 2025 to US$1,600 to 1,700 a tonne while farm-gate prices lag at about US$0.50 per kg.

The brief’s figures and other published figures

Several of the brief’s figures differ from official statistics or other sources. The differences mostly turn on the year or the measure used, and the table sets them side by side.

Status and timeline

The brief, issued in 2026, says the immediate focus is the Kilifi pilot and asks for anchor funders. No funder, agreement or start date has been announced, and no public record of the initiative beyond the brief was found as of October 2026. GDI Africa’s list of its initiatives does not mention Agri Advance or cashew.¹⁰

The initiative arrives during a renewed government push on the crop. On 8 January 2026 Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe visited farmers and processors in Kilifi, said Kenya produced about 13,000 tonnes against an installed processing capacity of 45,000 tonnes, and cited the AFA’s estimate that a fully revived industry could create up to 350,000 jobs and add more than KSh 30 billion to GDP. In March 2024 national officials and Kilifi leaders, including Governor Gideon Mung’aro, agreed to repossess the former state cashew factory in Kilifi from Millennium Management Limited as part of a revival plan; no report that the repossession was completed was found.¹¹ Kilifi’s development plan for 2023 to 2027 budgets KSh 42 million over five years to plant cashew and coconut trees, from 800 acres in the first year to 4,100 acres a year from the third.¹² Nothing links KCNI to these programmes.

How the project is being procured

No Terms of Reference or tender exists; the pilot is a privately run programme seeking grant or impact funding from “anchor funders”. Its collection centres and traceability system would operate under the Crops (Nuts and Oil Crops) Regulations, which require dealers and processors to be licensed by the AFA. An order of 2009 prohibits the export of raw cashew nuts, and the licences issued under the current regulations do not authorise it, so the brief’s export markets would be served through Kenyan processors.¹³¹⁴

Who is involved

GDI Africa is the African arm of the Global Development Incubator, which also incubated the Economic Development and Investment Council for Greater Mombasa. The brief names Kinyua M’Mbijjewe as its contact; GDI’s profile describes him as Director, Food Systems Innovation and Agriculture Value Chains, at GDI Africa.¹⁵ The proposed lead off-taker, Nuts and More, runs a cashew factory in Kilifi; in 2024 it told the Kenya News Agency that it could process more than 6,000 tonnes a shift but had secured only 3,000 tonnes locally and was importing nuts from Tanzania.¹⁶ The AFA’s Nuts and Oil Crops Directorate regulates the sector, and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization’s centre at Mtwapa breeds new cashew varieties.

• GDI Africa
• Agriculture and Food Authority

Concerns and counterpoints

No one has commented in public on the initiative itself. The points below come from the record of Kenya’s cashew sector and of comparable efforts, as general context.

Supply, not processing, is short

Kenya’s processors already report too few nuts: Nuts and More imports from Tanzania to keep its Kilifi factory running, and Kenya imported 945 tonnes of in-shell cashew in 2024.¹⁷ The AFA reports that the area under cashew is shrinking, with Kilifi and Kwale accounting for more than 90 per cent of the 2024 decline, because farmers fell trees for firewood, and that low farm-gate prices have led many to abandon their farms. Better aggregation and prices may help, but the brief does not include replanting or replacing ageing trees, and Kilifi’s own plan sets planting targets of a few thousand acres a year.

A history of failed revivals

Githua Kihara, writing in The Elephant, traces the sector’s decline from the state-backed Kenya Cashewnuts factory of 1975, through its collapse in 1997, receivership and sale to Millennium Management in 2002, to the loss of cooperative marketing and the rise of brokers; he also argues that the 2009 export ban was imposed hastily.¹⁸ Farm Africa and Ten Senses Africa ran a cashew and sesame project with 15,000 smallholders in Kilifi, Lamu and Kwale from 2018 to 2020. Lamu growers have asked for the export ban to be lifted, their chairman Mohamed Athmani saying that the number of active farmers had fallen from more than 10,000 to about 3,000.¹⁹ A new initiative would need to show what it does differently.

Price and market risk

Raw cashew prices are volatile: the late-2024 spike eased through 2025. The brief notes no price floor or risk-sharing arrangement for farmers, and its price uplift depends on processors paying a premium for traceable nuts.

Sources

• Kenya Cashew Nut Initiative, Agri Advance, a division of GDI Africa, 2026.
• The Crops (Nuts and Oil Crops) Regulations, 2020, Kenya Law.
• Kilifi County Integrated Development Plan 2023-2027, County Government of Kilifi.
• Yearbook of Statistics 2025, Agriculture and Food Authority (11 MB, linked rather than uploaded).
• The European market potential for cashew nuts, CBI, 2026.
• The Agriculture (Prohibition of Exportation of Raw Nuts) Order, 2009, via FAOLEX.