This blog has been cross posted from the CGIAR Space
On 24 February 2026, policymakers, researchers, development partners, and civil society organizations gathered in Nairobi for the launch of the CGIAR Policy Innovations Hub for Kenya. Rather than a ceremonial launch, the event was designed as a working policy dialogue focused on how evidence can better inform implementation, prioritization, and future planning within Kenya’s agri-food system transformation agenda.
The Policy Innovations Hub for Kenya is one of five hubs established globally in 2026, alongside Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Malawi. Jointly anchored by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the hub is not intended to function as a standalone research project. Instead, it serves as a structured interface between policy demand and research supply, designed to embed evidence into real policy cycles, clarify trade-offs, and support the co-creation of a research agenda shaped by policymakers, implementers, researchers, and development partners.
Kenya's selection as a hub country reflects both the urgency of its challenges and the strength of its institutional foundation. The country's leadership has placed agriculture at the center of its ambition to achieve High-Income Country (HIC) status, anchored by major frameworks including the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) and Vision 2030. As implementation of these frameworks accelerates, the choices facing policymakers are becoming more complex: productivity versus sustainability, subsidies versus fiscal prudence, short-term relief versus long-term resilience. The hub's mandate is to make those choices better informed.
The structure of the launch dialogue reflected this mandate directly. The program moved from reviewing examples of existing co-created evidence and its contribution to current policy discussions, to identifying implementation bottlenecks and evidence gaps, before concluding with a forward-looking discussion on Kenya’s research and policy priorities for 2027 and beyond.
This post distills the three central conversations from the launch dialogue.
What Do We Know? Using Co-Created Evidence to Inform Current Policy
Kenya does not lack research. What the launch dialogue made clear is that a growing body of co-created evidence, produced through genuine partnership between CGIAR researchers, Kenyan government institutions, and national and international research bodies, is already informing decisions at both national and county levels. Six areas received particular attention.
Food systems and the high-income status pathway. Research by KIPPRA and IFPRI has modeled the specific role food system transformation must play if Kenya is to achieve HIC status beyond Vision 2030. This work provides a quantitative framework for connecting agricultural productivity targets to macroeconomic outcomes; a connection that has historically been made through assumption rather than analysis.
Fertilizer subsidies and soil health. A collaborative study by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development (MoALD), GIZ, and IFPRI has generated evidence-based options for making Kenya's fertilizer subsidy program more efficient and equitable. At a time when fertilizer subsidy reforms are among the most politically sensitive decisions in the agricultural sector, this co-created evidence provides policymakers with a defensible basis for reform choices.
Tracking food systems policy performance. Research from the Tegemeo Institute and IFPRI has examined when and how evidence actually matters in policy design and implementation, a meta-level inquiry that is itself policy-relevant. The finding that evidence uptake depends heavily on how research is framed and timed reinforces a point made strongly at the launch: policy communication is not a secondary concern. As one participant noted, understanding the political economy of a ministry, knowing whom to talk to, and when, is as important as the quality of the evidence itself.
Irrigation expansion. Evidence generated with the National Treasury has documented the lessons from Kenya's irrigation expansion efforts, with specific attention to implementation effectiveness and resource efficiency. This work directly addresses one of the most capital-intensive areas of agricultural investment, where evidence-to-decision gaps are especially costly.
Livestock disease control. Joint research by the Directorate of Veterinary Services and ILRI has made the economic case for investing in Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) and Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR) vaccination as a development choice, not merely a health intervention. By quantifying the productivity and income implications of disease burden, this work repositions veterinary investment within a development finance logic.
Social protection and resilience. Research linking social protection programs to agricultural resilience outcomes has demonstrated how safety nets can function as enabling infrastructure for smallholder households, not simply as welfare transfers.
Taken together, these six examples represent the kind of evidence base Kenya's policy hub is built to leverage and extend. At the same time, the discussion revealed a recurring concern across institutions: Kenya does not necessarily face a shortage of research, but rather a persistent challenge in translating evidence into operational decisions, implementation systems, and scalable policy action. As Dr. Eldah Onsomu of KIPPRA put it during the dialogue, "we need to know what the policymaker needs and what the researcher is producing", a formulation that captures both the gap and its solution.
Where Are the Gaps? Evidence Deficits and Implementation Constraints
The launch dialogue was equally candid about where evidence is missing and where implementation is stalling. Three patterns emerged with particular clarity. Interactive polling reinforced these concerns. Participants identified implementation capacity and political economy constraints as the two areas where policy processes most frequently stall. Real-time data systems, impact evaluation, and scenario modelling were identified as the evidence types most lacking for effective implementation
The gap between research production and practice application. Dr. Richard Kyumo, CEO of the National Livestock Development and Promotion Service, offered a pointed observation that resonated across the room: "We have a lot of research, but transferring our knowledge to practice, that is where we are losing it big time." This is not a criticism of research quality. It is a structural observation about the absence of formal mechanisms for moving findings into decisions and actions. Mr. Antony Mugambi of the County Assemblies Forum raised a related concern: the hundreds of graduate theses deposited in university libraries each year represent an underutilized reservoir of policy-relevant insight that currently has no systematic pathway to policymakers.
Implementation capacity gaps at the operational level. The dialogue identified implementation constraints that are specific and addressable rather than generic. Participants cited targeting failures: programs that reach the wrong beneficiaries because beneficiary data is outdated or incomplete, alongside sequencing problems, where the order of interventions undermines their cumulative impact. Weak coordination between national and county governments, misaligned incentive structures for frontline officials, and fragmented data systems were also flagged as implementation constraints that research has not adequately engaged.
Evidence gaps by type, not just topic. The launch produced a notable finding: when participants were asked to identify where evidence is most critically missing, the top three responses were real-time data systems, rigorous impact evaluation, and scenario modelling. This is revealing. The demand is not primarily for more descriptive research about Kenya's agricultural challenges, those are relatively well-documented. The demand is for dynamic evidence that can support anticipatory policymaking: evidence that updates in real time, that measures what actually happened when interventions were implemented, and that models what will happen under different future scenarios. Prof. Cecilia Onyango of the University of Nairobi captured an important nuance: "Not all research directly informs policy. Some informs practice, and practice can inform policy." The implication is that the impact pathway from research to policy outcomes is longer and more indirect than the hub model sometimes assumes, and that supporting practice-level translation deserves as much investment as direct policy engagement.
Political economy as a design constraint. One of the most consistently voiced themes across both sessions was that the political economy of policymaking is itself an evidence gap. Research that does not account for who makes decisions, under what constraints, with what incentives, and in response to which constituencies will remain peripheral regardless of its technical quality. Participants called for the hub to invest in political economy analysis as a companion to technical research, not as a separate undertaking.
Looking Ahead: Shaping the Evidence Agenda for 2027 and Beyond
The third component of the launch was explicitly forward-looking: a structured discussion to jointly define the research priorities that should guide CGIAR-Kenya collaboration from 2027 onwards, aligned with Medium-Term Plan V and the "Beyond 2030" agenda. The exercise produced a clear hierarchy of emerging priorities.
The top three policy areas requiring new evidence by 2027 were identified as youth employment in agriculture, climate resilience, and productivity and input systems. Similarly, participants ranked youth employment, climate resilience, productivity growth, and inclusion and gender among the most important research priorities for the 2027–2030 period. These are not surprising priorities, they appear consistently across Kenya's policy frameworks. What the dialogue surfaced was the specific evidence architecture needed to address them: not more descriptive analysis of the problems, but quantified modelling of policy options, impact evaluations of scaled programs, and anticipatory risk assessments that can inform budget decisions before crises emerge.
The top three emerging risks identified by participants were climate shocks, pest and disease outbreaks, and market volatility. All three share a common characteristic: they are systemic risks whose impacts are unequally distributed across the agricultural sector, with smallholder households and food-insecure populations bearing disproportionate costs. Effective anticipatory policy requires evidence that can identify which populations are most exposed, which interventions are most cost-effective at scale, and how different risk events interact.
The top three policy reform areas calling for evidence-based advocacy were climate finance, fertilizer and soil health, and digital agriculture. Climate finance is particularly significant: as Kenya advances its climate adaptation commitments, the question of how agricultural investment can access climate finance instruments, and which types of financing work best for which types of interventions, represents an evidence gap with direct fiscal implications.
The institutional dimension of the "Beyond 2030" agenda was raised by several participants. Dr. Alice Murage of KALRO emphasized the need to put as much emphasis on implementation as on research; a call for the hub to invest in understanding what scaling requires institutionally, not just what the evidence recommends technically. Ms. Priscilla Muiruri, chair of the National Food Systems Technical Working Group, framed this as a question of innovation: "Research is a game changer only if it is leading innovations."
Beyond a Launch: Building a Long-Term Policy–Research Interface
The closing remarks at the launch framed the hub's purpose with deliberate precision: it is a mechanism, not an event. It exists to accompany policy processes rather than comment on them after the fact, to clarify options and quantify trade-offs, and to co-design research based on explicit demand from the institutions that must act on it.
For policymakers and research partners, the dialogue produced three practical commitments: maintaining structured institutional contact points with the hub; identifying priority evidence needs for the next planning cycle; and ensuring that future analytical work is aligned with formal budgeting and planning timelines.
The questions Kenya faces as it advances its transformation agenda will only become more complex. The fiscal trade-offs will tighten. The climate pressures will intensify. The choices between competing priorities will become harder to navigate without a clear analytical basis. The Kenya Policy Innovations Hub is designed to be present for those choices, not as an outside commentator, but as a structured partner in the decisions that will define Kenya's agricultural future.
For stakeholders across government, research institutions, the private sector, and development organizations, the hub’s effectiveness will depend directly on the depth and continuity of engagement it receives. Co-creation is not a one-time consultation exercise; it requires sustained institutional collaboration, joint priority-setting, and continuous interaction between evidence producers and decision-makers. The question posed to all participants at the close of the launch remains the most important one: Are you prepared to co-design research with government and CGIAR from inception?
The CGIAR Policy Innovations Hub for Kenya is jointly anchored by ILRI and IFPRI. For more information on the hub's mandate and research agenda, visit cgiar.org/policy-innovations.