Kenyan President William Ruto ordered the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) to build a tea value-addition facility at the Port of Mombasa. He approved 50 acres of land for the project. Ruto spoke on 9 October 2026, at the close of the Agriculture & Food Systems Transformation Summit in Nairobi. He also demanded transparency over why tea factories paid wildly different bonuses for the same harvest.
Some factories paid growers as little as KSh12 (about £0.07) a kilogram this year. Others paid up to KSh50 (about £0.30) for tea of comparable quality, Ruto said, responding to farmers’ questions at the summit. He blamed the gap mainly on weak factory management and outdated machinery, not differences in the tea itself. “The differences in payments must be discussed openly,” he said.
The government has allocated KSh850m (about £5m) to help underperforming factories modernise their equipment, according to the president’s office. Ruto urged farmers to elect factory leaders who prioritise better returns. He said investors would be encouraged to build further value-addition plants alongside KTDA’s own facilities, rather than leaving expansion to the state-linked agency alone.
Processing closer to export
Kenya is the world’s third-largest tea producer and its leading exporter of black tea. Most of that tea has historically left the country only lightly processed, limiting the value that reaches growers. A processing plant at Mombasa, the country’s main export port, is meant to let more blending, packaging and branding happen domestically before shipment. That would capture value that currently goes to buyers overseas who repackage Kenyan tea under their own labels.
The Cabinet Secretary for Agriculture is expected to give further details on the Mombasa project soon, including a construction timeline. KTDA, a farmer-owned agency that manages most of Kenya’s smallholder tea factories, would operate the new facility. It would draw on its existing network of collection centres across the country’s tea-growing highlands.
A long-running grievance
Bonus payment disparities have long troubled Kenya’s roughly 650,000 smallholder tea farmers. Growers depend on the annual bonus, paid on top of monthly advances, as their main income from the crop. Previous governments have reviewed factory governance without closing the gap between well-run and poorly run processing plants. Many growers now compare notes informally about which factories pay better before deciding where to deliver their leaf.
Ruto’s directive sets no deadline for closing the pay gap. The KSh850m allocation covers only equipment upgrades, not compensation for farmers who received lower bonuses this year. Agricultural economists in Nairobi say success depends on whether KTDA can enforce stricter management standards at the weakest factories. Earlier reform efforts have struggled here, partly because factory boards are elected locally and resist outside oversight of their decisions.
What farmers want tracked next
Farmer representatives who attended the Nairobi summit said they want the agriculture ministry to publish factory-by-factory bonus figures each season, rather than leaving growers to compare payslips informally. A standard public scorecard, they argue, would make it harder for poorly managed factories to avoid scrutiny and would give farmers clearer grounds to switch delivery to better-paying processors nearby.
KTDA has not said whether it will adopt such reporting. Kenya’s tea sector remains the country’s second-largest export earner after horticulture, and the outcome of this dispute will shape how much of that earning power reaches the smallholders who grow the crop, rather than the factories that process it.
The tea directive follows a separate accountability dispute in western Kenya, where a governor has demanded an investigation into a fuel spill on the Nyando River, suggesting a wider push this month for clearer answers from state-linked operators on how they are run.
