SCIENCE@home

Coordination and governance bottlenecks to smallholder vegetable producers’ capacity for supermarkets supply in Kenya

Mwangi Joseph Kanyua,Hillary Bett

Published 2025 in Journal of Eastern African Studies

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT Although supermarket retail renaissance in Kenya has created opportunities that were hitherto associated with export markets, smallholder farmers remain marginal actors in these emerging chains. This paper evaluates how supermarket supply chain governance and coordination structures hinder smallholders’ ability to secure supermarket supply contracts. Findings indicate that smallholders’ limited production and marketing capacities, inability to provide value-adding value chain services make them undesirable trading partners. This is because supermarkets’ desire to minimize the cost of exchange, offer uniform and premium quality produce, and assure food safety has led to either centralization or outsourcing of the vegetable procurement function. Consequently, there exists high demand for coordinated exchange through relational contracts, more value-adding chain activities being performed by a few firms, and need for value chain finance. Within the resultant contracts, specialized buying firms and large-capacity aggregators take precedence with smallholders in the periphery. Ineffective executive governance by state actors has resulted in minimal interventions to enhance the marketing capacity of smallholder producers, further alienating them. Likewise, the collapse of dominant supermarkets brands and the exit of regional retailers are indicative of a turbulent sector, which further depresses incentives of buyers to undertake specific investments needed to enhance the capacity of producers.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-74 of 74 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

  • No citing papers are available for this paper.

Showing 0-0 of 0 citing papers · Page 1 of 1