William's Story
William Kiprop, is 32 and is from Kiptoi village, in the Rift Valley province of Eastern Kenya.
Married to Rose and with two children (a four year-old girl and a two year-old boy) he has been a farmer for more than ten years. Besides farming he is a secretary for the Kiptoi Initiative for the Youth Group. He is also a trainer on issues related to HIV/AIDS awareness, poverty alleviation through small scale agricultural production. Kiprop is a full and active member of NGOMA, an ActionAid Kenya initiative established as a means of organizing farmers to help them address production, processing and marketing related issues affecting dairy and maize farmers in Rift Region in Kenya.
Like many other farmers in his location, Kiprop is not very happy with the inputs he received freely through government’s National Accelerated Agricultural Input Access Programme (NAAIAP). The programme has been badly administered and farmers are not given any say as to how the assistance would best benefit them. Farmers with less than one acre of land, have received no help.
“The problem is - we are forced to take what is there, our choices or preferences notwithstanding”, he sais.
ActionAid's report, ‘Fertile Ground: How governments and donors can halve hunger by supporting small farmers’ shows how inadequate public services for smallholder farmers coupled unequal distribution is one of causes of hunger and chronic food insecurity in Kenya. In William's area, only two extension officers serve the entire population of more than 25,000 farmers; accessing such services has not been easy for many.
“No extension officer has ever come to recommend to us the varieties of maize seeds that suits our soils and environmental conditions”, reports Kiprop. We see them walk around taking their notes but they never engage with us”.
Hunger is not an issue of the amount of food, rather it is to do with the politics of distribution. Despite a regional commitment to spend 10% of budgets on Agriculture, Kenya currently spends only 4.5% of it's national budget on the sector, a figure which when narrowed down to food security, drops to a mere 1.2%.
