Anne Nyaga
Kenyan agricultural entrepreneur-turned-policy maker Anne Nyaga began with a single acre of watermelon in Embu in 2008, staked on a KSh 20,000 loan. Within five seasons she had parlayed that patch into a mixed-crop and livestock enterprise supplying regional markets a bootstrap success that vaulted her onto agribusiness award lists and, in 2020, into cabinet as Chief Administrative Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries & Co-operatives.
At the ministry she has become the face of youth-centred reform: reviving Kenya’s dormant 4-K Clubs to reach two million pupils, rolling out kitchen-garden starter kits that boosted household nutrition during the pandemic, and engineering an affordable-credit window that channels low-interest loans to first-time farmers. Nyaga also champions digital extension services that stream real-time weather and market data to village smartphones, arguing that “farmers need dashboards, not guesswork.” Her next push is a climate-smart stimulus that rewards smallholders who adopt drip irrigation and drought-tolerant seed, aiming to double productivity while shrinking agriculture’s carbon footprint. From field rows to policy rows, Nyaga’s career shows how entrepreneurial grit can scale to national food security and why the next generation of Kenyan farmers might sign business plans before they sow seed.