Providing potato farmers access to affordable (micro) finance is an important element for further upscaling Kenya’s potato value chain.

Via partnerships with financiers, PSA supports potato farmers in acquiring access to micro finance. An example of this is our collaboration with the Mavuno Zaidi™ program from Syngenta, supported by the Sustainable Trade Initiative IDH.

This program demonstrates how the potato farmer eco-system works in practice. A group of farmers are growing the Markies variety for offtake by Sereni Fries, who uses these potatoes to process them into chips for the fast food industry. The farmers are supported by value chain partners: crop nutrition demand is facilitated by Yara Kenya; crop protection is supplied by Syngenta and Agrico PSA delivers certified Markies seed potatoes. Finally affordable micro credit is provided by Equity Bank Kenya. Naturally our agronomist is also providing potato training to farmers, as can be seen on our Facebook page.

Currently the Mavuno Zaidi™ program works with about 26,000 tomato and potato farmers with the goal of providing access to finance for 100,000 farmers in the coming years.