Aiming to improve the aquaculture industry in Kenya

Fridah Nyakundi’s parents were educators and small-holder farmers in Kenya who made their living growing chickens, livestock, corn, and beans when she was a child. Each, in their own way, encouraged her not to follow in their footsteps. Bankers, they often pointed out, had comfortable positions and did well financially. 

Although Nyakundi went on to study economics at the University of Nairobi, she did not become a banker. She didn’t become a small-holder farmer either. Instead, she has made a career studying such farmers, including as a PhD candidate at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER). Her research has focused on how tilapia fish farmers in western Kenya perceive and manage risk, and whether their perceptions align with their actual experiences; one of her resulting papers was published last month in Aquaculture. Nyakundi’s findings suggest the aquaculture sector in Kenya and in Africa more generally needs policies that move beyond production promotion toward risk governance, commercial discipline, market infrastructure, and environmental monitoring.   

A Stanford King Center on Global Development Graduate Student Research Funding recipient, Nyakundi aims to improve food policy and production in her country and other net-importing countries where economic or agricultural shocks can be particularly devastating. 

“How can countries produce food, improve livelihoods, and move from being net importers to producing enough to feed their populations?” she says. “How can you improve production efficiencies and the market orientation of these products?”

Aquaculture—the breeding, rearing, and harvesting of animals and plants (blue foods) in water—is a growing sector of the food supply system: In 2022, for the first time ever, more animal blue foods were harvested from aquaculture than from traditional fishing methods, and demand continues to grow, especially in Africa. In Kenya, Nyakundi writes, pond farming—in clay or plastic-lined water pits—has been around for more than a century while cage farming—using floating structures and nets on open waters in lakes—is a newer phenomenon. The government has played an active role in stimulating aquaculture, including through import taxes on fish and financial incentives: The past Economic Stimulus Project and an ongoing Aquaculture Business Development Programme both benefit pond farmers. Cage farming, which produces most of the country’s output, has not benefited from these government funding programs in the past. 

Nyakundi’s research reveals differences in the perceived and actual risks faced by cage and pond farmers that lead to overmanaging in risk mitigation strategies for common (but low-cost) threats such as predation from birds, but undermanaging in preventative measures for rarer but more damaging events, such as mass kills from water quality management issues. She also argues for greater support for the industry from the Kenyan government, including through the development of cold storage facilities that would allow farmers to harvest in bulk and safely store their product while they appropriately time their sales. 

Aquaculture has been extensively studied in Asia, and Nyakundi hopes her work will help inform policies in Africa, especially in the relatively nascent but rapidly expanding cage farming industry. 

“Much of what we know about Nile Tilapia risk comes from Asia, especially in China, where the growth of the industry wasn’t challenge free,” she says. “How can fish farming risks unique to Kenya and most of Africa such as weaker cold chains, thinner finance, limited insurance, less developed producer organizations, and more fragmented markets be resolved? How can we learn lessons from Asia to inform Africa? How can Africa’s aquaculture grow sustainably to prevent the shocks they saw in Asia?” 

Nyakundi’s introduction to the fields of food security and agricultural economics came in 2014 when she worked as an analyst at the social enterprise One Acre Fund.“I got very interested from a different angle than what I had seen as a child,” she explains. “How can we change people’s behavior—how they farm, what they farm?” 

Nyakundi next spent several years at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, part of CGIAR, a global agricultural innovation network. Her projects there focused on climate-smart agriculture, including studies of coffee production in Colombia and irrigation systems in Senegal. She initially planned to study irrigation at Stanford as well, but, after connecting with King Center faculty affiliate Rosamond Naylor, a Doerr School of Sustainability professor, she began exploring aquaculture in Kenya. At first, she says, she was nervous to leave “the terrestrial food system.”  

“That’s all I knew—livestock, crops,” she said. But Naylor persuaded her. “She said, ‘you’re not leaving the food system; you’re just looking at a different part of the food system.’” 

There are major differences, however.  

“If you have a backyard and want to grow a tomato, you can literally just go there and grow a tomato—you can independently make decisions,” she says. “But, when it comes to blue foods…oceans or lakes [might be] used for conservation, navigation, fishing, farming—it’s a commons.” 

During her PhD, Nyakundi has spent nearly four years studying both pond and cage tilapia farms and farmers in Kenya, including field visits and interviews with key stakeholders, including farmers, suppliers, private funders, and government officials. Ultimately, she developed a survey measuring sociodemographic data, perceptions of risk, and exposure to shocks. Nearly 400 farmers in the Lake Victoria region responded with their assessments of risk management strategies and the financial costs of both preventative measures and unmanaged risks. 

One of the most common risks for fish farmers in Kenya is the variable price of commercial feed. To avoid high prices, both pond and cage farmers regularly rely on cheaper homemade feeds, even though doing so results in a longer maturation cycle and therefore a less profitable harvest. 

Nyakundi said she was most surprised by the high perceived and actual risk of theft, which is not only a security issue but also a market problem. Trying to avoid loss from theft impacts the way farmers care for and harvest their fish. For instance, farmers are reluctant to allow people access to their cages for cleaning because they worry they might be covertly planning to steal their product; cage farmers also harvest in bulk, rather than in batches because partial harvesting would leave product vulnerable to bad actors who might be observing cages. Harvesting in bulk, without access to adequate cold storage facilities, forces farmers to sell large volumes quickly, weakening their bargaining power. 

Nyakundi finds the work personally and professionally rewarding.  

“I’m one of those people asking questions at farmers’ markets,” she laughs. “I’m interested in thinking about food as beyond just something you eat.” 

In the fall, Nyakundi will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy where her research will bring together her past work on terrestrial foods and her latest inquiries into aquaculture. 

“For the longest time, the terrestrial food system has shaped food policy as we know it,” she says. “But with climate change and carbon footprints, we need to rethink blue foods and their positive benefits—to really integrate them into the broader food system.”