About — Kenya Agri Atlas

Mission

Kenya's agricultural sector is one of the most studied parts of the country's economy — and one of the hardest to read at a glance. Reports come from KNBS, MoALD, the commodity boards, the World Bank, FAO and dozens of NGOs and academic institutions, each in its own format, each with its own coverage gaps. Stitching them together to answer a single question — “how big is Kenya's tea industry, really?” — costs days of expert analyst time.

The Atlas is a single explorable surface that sits on top of these scattered sources and lets a non-specialist read them coherently. It is not a primary research project. It does not collect new data. It cites, harmonises, visualises and explains.

Verified public sources, harmonised. One place to read Kenya's agricultural numbers — without flipping between five PDFs.— Atlas charter

Scope

The Atlas covers six topical chapters plus two reference chapters — eight chapters in total, each implemented as its own dashboard:

Chapter 01 · Macroeconomy — agriculture's place in the national economy, GDP share, growth, public spending, the Maputo gap.
Chapter 02 · Crops — maize, tea, coffee, horticulture, sugarcane, cut flowers, avocado.
Chapter 03 · Livestock — cattle, dairy, poultry, sheep, goats, camel, pastoralism.
Chapter 04 · Trade — agricultural exports, food imports, self-sufficiency, the trade balance.
Chapter 05 · Counties — production rankings across all 47 devolved counties.
Chapter 06 · Employment — workforce share, gender, age, formal vs informal, productivity.
Chapter 07 · About — this page.
Chapter 08 · Sources — every cited source, ranked by tier of authority.

Methodology

Each chart in the Atlas is built from a published source. The Atlas does not estimate, model or extrapolate beyond what a source explicitly publishes. Where the same indicator is reported by multiple sources at different values (which happens often), we choose one source per chart — based on the priority order below — and disclose the alternatives in the source line.

For commodity-by-county figures, we lean on MoALD's National Agriculture Production Reports and the relevant commodity board (Tea Board, Coffee Directorate, HCD, Kenya Dairy Board) where one exists. For aggregated farmgate value, we use the SAFIC Knowledge Base bottom-up reconstruction.

Source priority

When two sources disagree, the Atlas prefers them in this order:

Tier 1 — Official Kenyan: KNBS Economic Survey, KNBS Statistical Abstract, MoALD National Agriculture Production Reports, National Treasury Budget statements.
Tier 2 — SAFIC Knowledge Base: Strathmore Agricultural Finance Innovation Centre's harmonised dataset, used for cross-commodity national value reconstructions.
Tier 3 — International: World Bank WDI, FAOSTAT, IMF Article IV, World Bank WITS — used where Kenyan data is unavailable or where a peer comparison is needed.
Tier 4 — Sector bodies: Tea Board of Kenya, Coffee Directorate, Horticultural Crops Directorate, Kenya Dairy Board, Kenya Flower Council, Kenya Revenue Authority — used for commodity-specific volume and price series.

Units & horizons

The Atlas keeps the units used by the original Kenyan source where possible:

Maize: 90-kg bags (the field standard).
Tea, coffee, horticulture, livestock: metric tonnes / kilotonnes.
Milk: litres / billion litres.
Money: KSh nominal for domestic indicators; USD for trade indicators.

Time horizons run from 2000 (or earlier where the source supports it) to 2024, with the most recent calendar year refreshed quarterly.

Geography

Sub-national data is reported at the county level — Kenya's primary unit of devolved governance since 2013. There are 47 counties. Where a source publishes data only at the level of the eight former provinces (pre-2013) we either map it to counties or note the limitation explicitly.

Caveats

Where a source publishes a single figure with no error bar, the Atlas reports that figure as published. It does not invent uncertainty bounds.
Informal trade — particularly in livestock, milk and cross-border maize — is structurally undercounted in every Kenyan source. The Atlas notes this in chapter narratives but cannot itself correct for it.
Drought years (2017, 2021, 2022) and the COVID-19 disruption (2020) materially distort year-on-year change. We always flag these explicitly.
“Smallholder” is defined here as a farm holding under 5 hectares (the working KNBS / FAO threshold for Kenya).

How to use

Each chapter is a standalone dashboard. Click any chart's “Open dashboard” link to read it in context, or use the navigation bar to move between chapters. The “Related” cards at the bottom of each chapter point to the next most relevant dashboard.

For citation, every chart shows its source on the line beneath it. For a complete source bibliography, see Chapter 08.

Update cycle

The Atlas is refreshed on a quarterly cadence to track the publication schedule of KNBS and MoALD. The current version is v2.0 (April 2026).

Partners

The Atlas draws on data and methodological work from the Strathmore Agricultural Finance Innovation Centre (SAFIC), the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, the State Department for Agriculture (MoALD), and Kenya's commodity boards. None of these organisations are responsible for the Atlas's interpretations.

License

All Atlas content — text, charts, derived datasets — is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). You can copy, redistribute, adapt and build upon the work for any purpose, including commercially, provided you credit “Kenya Agri Atlas” and link back to this page. Underlying source data carries the licenses set by its publishers.

Contact

For corrections, source suggestions or methodology questions, please get in touch via the newsletter signup below — replies come from a real human.

An independent data atlas for Kenya's food and agricultural sector.