International Funding Mechanisms for Kenya’s Big Four: The Case of Food Security

A vibrant agricultural sector is very crucial and critical for alleviating Kenya's food security problem, poverty alleviation, and for laying the foundations for sustained future economic growth. Indeed, food security is one of the Big Four Agenda that should be the plan to take Kenya across the frontier into the next development level. Efforts for food security growth and recovery, often through structural adjustment lending, have suffered from inadequate information about country and sometimes regional specific factors, and from an emphasis on macroeconomic policies without complementary interventions at the sector level as well as limited international trade interactions. Factors such as government action at the sector and subsector levels in such critical areas like land policy, smallholders' access to inputs, and agricultural research needs to be combined with trade and macroeconomic reforms to achieve sustained and broad based food security enhancement. This growth, in addition to food security, would guarantee employment, increase foreign exchange reserves and help in lowering government budget deficit, all necessary for Kenya's Big Four Agenda. There are many funding mechanisms that could be utilised to achieve the various reforms that are needed for Kenya to achieve her agendas. This paper will tints seek to understand what funding mechanisms are available and why they haven't been utilised or why, if they have, have failed to add to the stride to food security.