The government has commenced training of government officers ahead of the planned national household farmer registration programme.

 Speaking at the Kenya School of Government yesterday,  Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mithika Linturi (pictured) said  government officers will be trained on how to distribute subsidies especially fertilisers.

 “We don’t want to have a scenario like that we are currently experiencing of drought. With proper planning, we will be able to address any situation that may arise in the future. Once we have this data, we will be able to know exact number of food we have produced and what as a government we should do,”he said. Linturi said the process will be conducted in two stages.

In the first phase,  assistant chiefs will record farmer details in printed questionnaires.

Questionnaires

 In the second stage, the administrators will consolidate the filled questionnaires and feed them in a digitised form using preconfigured android tablets and smartphones to a central server for aggregation in real-time.  

The meeting brings together 141 administrators from across the country and 47 county directors of agriculture.

 Linturi said that in the next five years, the government plans to transform the agriculture sector by increasing productivity in all priority value chains and also increasing land under irrigation.

 “To produce the desired results, the Government has laid out a sound recovery and transformation plan geared towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals,”  the CS said.

 Interior PS Raymond Omollo said that the planned nationwide farmers’ registration exercise will be free and voluntary with collected data being well secured.

 “Registration is free and we shall be decisive on dereliction of duty by any of our officers,” he said.