In July 2024, 2,226 farmers in Kenya’s Embu and Tharaka Nithi regions were paid for trees they had planted and kept alive. The money arrived by mobile phone and came to Ksh12,237,467 (USD$94,135). Divided among them, that is about KES 5,500 (USD$42) each, for a year of doing exactly what every climate communique since Paris has said the world urgently needs done.
I offer that number because the money reached the right people, through a channel that worked, without an intermediary taking the difference, which is unusual enough to be worth reporting on its own. It is the most honest figure I have for where global climate finance actually meets an African smallholder, and because the delegates travelling to Antalya for the Conference of Parties (COP31) in November should have to look at it. The question at COP31 is not whether smallholder farmers can deliver climate outcomes. Four years of evidence from eastern Kenya says they can. The question is whether anyone intends to pay them enough to carry on.
Between 2022 and 2025, AGRA and the IKEA Foundation ran a Strengthening Regenerative Agriculture in Kenya (STRAK) programme in Makueni, Kitui, Embu and Tharaka Nithi, four of Kenya’s drier counties. It worked with 120,060 farmers on manure, mulching, crop rotation, intercropping, cover crops, agroforestry, minimum tillage and fertilizer applied in small, measured doses beside the seed rather than broadcast across the field. On controlled plots the agronomy held up. In Makueni, maize under mulching and microdosing returned Ksh7.41 (USD$0.057) for every shilling spent. Modelling by our research partner put potential erosion reduction up to 85 percent.
Now, the part a press release would leave out, is that in Tharaka Nithi, the practice farmers were already using outearned every regenerative treatment we tested. In Kitui, every bean treatment returned less than it cost. Soybean in Embu lost money outright. An independent midline survey found comparison villages ahead of project villages on five of the nine practices measured. And microdosing, the one practice that most reduces fertilizer use per hectare, had the lowest uptake of anything we promoted, somewhere between 13 percent and 18 percent.
Those two sets of findings describe the same thing. That farmers took up the practices that were cheap and left the ones that were not. Organic manure reached roughly 96 percent uptake because manure is mostly labour. Microdosing stalled because it needs cash at planting, which is precisely the moment a smallholder has none. The binding constraint on regenerative agriculture in eastern Kenya is not knowledge, conviction or extension. It is working capital. The farmers behaved rationally and our own data says so.
The obvious objection is that this is an argument for subsidy wearing the clothes of an argument for markets, and that carbon finance is a poor instrument anyway, volatile in price, heavy in verification cost and inclined to overstate what it buys. I accept most of that because the measurement problem is real and the price is set in rooms Kenyan farmers do not enter. But the alternative currently on offer is not a better instrument but another decade of pilots.
There is, however, a second figure worth setting beside the first. That some 382 village-based advisors earned Ksh66.6 million (USD$512,307) in commissions over two years, roughly Ksh87,000 a year each. That built something a project cannot, which is a rural service business farmers pay for out of their own pockets. It also lost one advisor in five before the programme closed, around 8 percent giving up and 12 percent leaving for better paid work further along the value chain. The lesson is clearly that a profession paying Ksh87,000 (USD$669) a year does not hold people.
Besides, STRAK’s economic analysis found an average benefit-cost ratio of 2.9, meaning every shilling invested in regenerative agriculture generated nearly three shillings in return. That single figure reframes restoration from a cost into an investment in household resilience, stronger local markets and a more dependable rural economy.
At this point, I am not in a position to tell you any of these outcomes lasted after the programme closed in December 2025. Whether farmers keep the practices, whether the advisory businesses survive and whether yields hold three years from now cannot be known until somebody returns and measures. We have committed to doing what most projects do not do, which is why this sector keeps rediscovering the same lessons and calling them innovations.
So the ask for Antalya is narrower than the usual one. And it is not recognition of smallholders as climate actors, because that argument is won and repeating it wastes a podium. It must instead focus on three things. First, carbon and adaptation finance priced against what the practice actually costs a farmer rather than against what a buyer would prefer to pay. Second, payment on delivery through channels that already function, as mobile money did here. And finally, credit that reaches the farm at planting rather than after harvest, because planting is where adoption is decided and harvest is where it is merely confirmed.
Africa hosts COP32 in Addis Ababa next year. Antalya is the last summit before that and therefore the rehearsal for it. If African negotiators arrive in Addis still asking the world to accept that smallholder farmers matter, the year will have been wasted. The more useful thing to arrive with is a price. Ksh5,500 a year is what land restoration is currently worth to the people doing it. Anyone in Antalya who believes that is sufficient should be made to say so out loud.
Alice Ruhweza is President of Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
