By Brandon Griffins and Karen A. Chagwaya
Abstract: Climate-smart agriculture has been widely promoted across Kenya as a pathway to protect smallholder livelihoods from increasingly unpredictable rainfall, prolonged drought, and declining soil productivity. Despite documented gains in yield, water retention, and household resilience among farmers who adopt these practices, uptake across rural Kenya remains inconsistent and in many counties low. This article examines five barriers and they’re deeply tangled up with each other that keep slowing CSA adoption in rural communities, financial and cost constraints, weak extension and knowledge delivery systems, land tenure and gender disparities, poor market and infrastructure access, and fragmented policy coordination. The argument here is pretty straightforward: farmers aren’t the ones who need convincing. Most of them already get it. It’s that the systems around them make it nearly impossible to act on what they already understand.
INTRODUCTION
Kenya’s agricultural sector remains overwhelmingly rain fed, which means it also remains overwhelmingly exposed to the Unpredictability of a changing climate. Climate-smart agriculture, the umbrella term for practices such as drought tolerant seed varieties, water pans, agroforestry, and integrated soil management has been positioned by government and development actors as the country’s primary response to this exposure. Where CSA has actually taken hold places like Machakos and Makueni, the results are hard to argue with. Zai pits, water pans, terracing: farmers using these are holding onto moisture and pulling better yields even in dry seasons, while conservation agriculture and agroforestry in the highlands have driven yield gains of 15 to 30 percent alongside improved soil health.
Yet adoption remains stubbornly uneven. The question this article addresses are not whether climate-smart agriculture works, but why so many rural farmers who could benefit from it have not taken it up. Drawing on recent Kenyan field research, this article identifies five persistent and interconnected barriers, cost, knowledge delivery, land and gender structures, market access, and policy coordination and argues that if county governments and NGOs keep treating this like a messaging problem, they’re going to keep getting the same results, which is to say, not much.
BARRIERS TO ADOPTION
Financial and Cost Constraints: Across nearly every county level study conducted in Kenya, cost emerges as the dominant obstacle to CSA adoption, and by a wide margin. A survey of smallholder dairy farmers in Njoro Sub-County, Nakuru County, found that high adoption costs were cited by 98.18 percent of respondents as their most significant constraint, followed by limited access to farm inputs at 91.82 percent, inadequate extension support at 85.45 percent, and limited access to credit at 83.64 percent, with the researchers concluding that financial constraints, poor extension services, and institutional barriers were the primary factors depressing adoption among dairy farmers (Masara & Nyamira, 2026). This finding is echoed at a national level. A study that went pretty deep, 146 farmer interviews, 22 key informant conversations, plus a literature review, across Southern Kenya, found that poverty and access to financial resources were the leading explanation for low CSA uptake, appearing consistently and with high frequency across all three evidence sources (Lenhardt et al., 2026). Perhaps more striking was what that same study uncovered about the mismatch between farmer needs and program design. Public and private actors overwhelmingly channel support toward education and training, while the farmers themselves report being motivated to adopt CSA but structurally unable to do so without direct financial or in-kind assistance (Lenhardt et al., 2026). A separate household survey across Kitui and Tharaka Nithi counties reinforced this picture, identifying high initial investment costs, inaccessible inputs, and inaccessible credit among the leading barriers reported by farmers (Nyangao et al., 2026).
Knowledge Gaps and Weak Extension Delivery: A common assumption among policymakers is that low adoption reflects low awareness. The evidence helps us see the situation more clearly. In Taita Taveta County, a Climate-Smart Agriculture Rapid Appraisal involving farmer workshops, household surveys, and key informant interviews found a clear disconnect between how state actors and farmers themselves perceived the problem: officials pointed to a lack of awareness, while farmers demonstrated real knowledge of climate change and CSA practices but described themselves as constrained by market mechanisms, land tenure issues, and a basic lack of resources (Autio et al., 2021). A comparable pattern surfaced in Makueni County, where researchers similarly found that farmers expressed sound knowledge of CSA practices even as agricultural sector officials continued to characterize awareness as the primary gap (Meti et al., 2025). Extension services aren’t useless when they work, they genuinely help. But a lot of that funding is essentially being thrown at a problem that isn’t actually there. Farmers know what CSA is. That’s not the gap. At the same time, there are too few extension workers to provide the direct, practical support that the farmers who need it most require.
Land Tenure and Gender Disparities: Long-term investments such as agroforestry, terracing, or water infrastructure only make sense to a farmer who expects to still be working that land in five or ten years. When farmers do not have secure land ownership, they are less likely to invest their limited resources in improving the land because they may not receive the benefits of those investments. And this doesn’t play out the same way for men and women, not even close. Land tenure systems across much of rural Kenya have historically favored male ownership, restricting women’s ability to acquire, inherit, or use land as loan collateral, which in turn limits their capacity to invest in improved agricultural technologies, compounded further by gender-biased credit systems that reduce women’s ability to purchase inputs such as fertilizer and improved seed. Analysis of CSA governance in Kenya has shown that even where women are legally entitled to inherit or own land, social pressure to preserve household gender dynamics often discourages them from claiming those rights, meaning land tenure can function as a tool of social control rather than a straightforward asset women can leverage (Eriksen & Crane, 2022). Livestock focused research in Baringo County adds a further layer, finding that communal land ownership arrangements and pastoral conflict reduced CSA adoption intensity in ways that varied significantly across male headed, female headed, and jointly managed households.
Market and Infrastructure Access: Even where a farmer has the resources and the security of tenure to adopt CSA, Weak infrastructure and limited market access can still reduce the benefits of these investments. Limited market access was flagged by 60 percent of dairy farmers surveyed in Nakuru County as a significant constraint (Masara & Nyamira, 2026), while broader research across Kenya’s arid and semi-arid counties identified poor infrastructure alongside unpredictable weather and low technical know-how as major barriers affecting 40 to 59 percent of farmers surveyed. You can grow more food, but if there’s no road to get it to market and no buyer waiting when you arrive, what exactly have you gained?, which weakens the economic case for adoption in the first place.
Fragmented Policy Coordination: It’s not like Kenya hasn’t tried on the policy side. The Kenya Climate-Smart Agriculture Project and the national CSA strategy running through 2026 reflect a genuine institutional commitment. But what’s actually happening out in the counties is a different story altogether. The same Kitui and Tharaka Nithi household survey that found high awareness of CSA practices also found only 27 to 45 percent awareness of the government policies designed to support them (Nyangao et al., 2026), while the Nakuru dairy study identified unclear policies and regulations as a constraint cited by over 77 percent of farmers (Masara & Nyamira, 2026). Under Kenya’s devolved system, county governments hold earmarked climate funds, but effective implementation of climate programs varies widely from one county to the next, leaving the strength of CSA support largely dependent on where a farmer happens to live.
CONCLUSION
These barriers don’t sit neatly in separate boxes, they pile on top of each other. A farmer without secure land tenure is also less likely to qualify for credit. A farmer without credit cannot act on the advice an extension officer gives her. A farmer producing a better harvest without reliable market access still struggles to convert that harvest into income. And yet the response has been to treat each of these as its own isolated issue, handed off to different agencies with no coordination. Unsurprisingly, that’s given us exactly the mess the research keeps turning up. Farmers who are aware, willing, and knowledgeable, but structurally unable to act on what they know. Kenya’s not going to close this gap by running more awareness campaigns at farmers who are already aware that these practices work the evidence suggests most already believe it and considerably more emphasis on direct financial support, secure and gender equitable land rights, well-resourced extension systems, functioning rural markets, and coordinated policy implementation across counties. Farmers aren’t the problem here. They’re being asked to make long-term investments with short-term resources on land they may not own in markets that may not pay them fairly. That’s not a knowledge gap, that’s a resource gap.
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