In June 2025, Kenya cut its agriculture sector budget. So did Uganda. Ethiopia’s allocation has remained flat at roughly 0.3% of GDP for years. None of the East African Community’s seven mainland economies are anywhere near the 10% benchmark that African heads of state recommitted to a decade ago in Malabo. And then, in April 2026, Tanzania tabled an agriculture budget request of Tsh 1.1 trillion — the third consecutive year above the trillion-shilling line, in a region where almost every neighbour is moving in the opposite direction.

Numbers like these matter because they describe, more honestly than any speech, what governments actually believe about agriculture. East Africa is now a region where 65% of the population is engaged in farming, where food prices are politically combustible, where climate volatility is reshaping production geography in real time, and where exports of agricultural produce are growing faster than almost any other category of foreign exchange earnings. The choices governments are making about how much public money to put behind that sector deserve a continental-scale comparison. So let me put one on the page.

Five countries, five budgets, one hard look

Set the FY 2025/26 and FY 2026/27 agriculture-ministry allocations of the major East African economies side by side, in dollar terms for direct comparison, and the picture is as follows.

Country	Latest agriculture-ministry budget	USD equivalent	Year-on-year direction
Tanzania	Tsh 1,105.95 billion (FY 2026/27)	≈ USD 425 million	Third consecutive year above Tsh 1 trillion
Kenya	KSh 47.6 billion (FY 2025/26)	≈ USD 369 million	Cut from KSh 54.6 billion the previous year — a reduction of roughly 13%
Uganda	UGX 815.5 billion (FY 2025/26)	≈ USD 220 million	Down from UGX 1.1 trillion — a fall of around 26%
Rwanda	RWF 75 billion for input subsidy alone (2025/26 season); MINAGRI total within RWF 7.03 trillion national budget	≈ USD 53 million (subsidy line only)	Input subsidy up roughly 39% — a positive signal in a small overall envelope
Ethiopia	Roughly 0.3% of GDP for agriculture-related spending (FY 2025/26)	Well below USD 100 million in agriculture-specific allocation	Flat in real terms; total federal budget ETB 1.93 trillion lost about 30% of dollar value through devaluation

Sources for the country-level figures appear with the country discussions below. Dollar conversions use exchange rates current to April 2026.

Reading the trajectories

Kenya: a budget that does not match the rhetoric

Kenya’s National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi tabled a national budget of KSh 4.29 trillion for FY 2025/26 last June. The agriculture sector received KSh 47.6 billion under the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda, with KSh 8 billion ring-fenced for the fertiliser subsidy programme. The headline allocation was a reduction of KSh 7 billion from the previous fiscal year, even as Kenyan agriculture continues to contribute around 22.5% of GDP and to support tens of millions of livelihoods. Civil society analysts and the Institute of Economic Affairs–Kenya have noted that the agriculture allocation now represents only about 3% of total national government spending — a long way from the 10% benchmark Kenya signed up to under the Maputo and Malabo declarations.

The composition of Kenya’s agriculture budget is also revealing. The largest single item, KSh 10.2 billion, goes to the National Agricultural Value Chain Development Project — a flagship programme that consumes a significant share of the development envelope. The fertiliser subsidy line holds steady at KSh 8 billion. But the operational allocations to extension, mechanisation, irrigation and storage are smaller and, in some cases, declining. Kenya is, on this evidence, attempting to do agricultural transformation on roughly the same money it spent before President Ruto took office, while devolving more responsibility to county governments who themselves operate under increasingly tight fiscal frames.

Uganda: a sharper cut, partially explained by reorganisation

Uganda’s reduction was steeper. The Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) saw its budget fall to UGX 815.5 billion for FY 2025/26, down from UGX 1.1 trillion the previous year. The Daily Monitor noted that the cut coincides with the rationalisation of several agencies — the Cotton Development Organisation, the Dairy Development Authority, the National Agricultural Advisory Services and the Uganda Coffee Development Authority were folded back into the parent ministry — which complicates the year-on-year comparison. Some functions previously sitting outside MAAIF are now inside its line.

But even after adjusting for that consolidation, civil-society budget analysts have flagged sustainability risks. The Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group has pointed to Uganda’s 19.1% interest-rate environment and high domestic-borrowing pressure as factors that crowd out private agricultural investment alongside the public-sector cut. The Independent reported that local-government production budgets have been hollowed out — in Soroti district, just 4.1% of total spending now goes to production, with 89% absorbed by recurrent costs. The Ugandan agriculture budget for FY 2025/26 remains substantial in absolute terms, but its real reach into smallholder activity is narrower than the headline number suggests.

Rwanda: a small envelope, used with discipline

Rwanda’s case is different in kind. The country runs a much smaller economy and a smaller national budget — RWF 7.03 trillion for FY 2025/26, about USD 5 billion. Within that envelope, however, agriculture is a clear strategic priority. The government has allocated RWF 75 billion to the national agricultural input subsidy programme for the 2025–2026 farming season, an increase of about 39% on the previous season. The IFAD-financed Kayonza Irrigation and Integrated Watershed Management Project added another USD 78.5 million in February 2026.

Behind the annual numbers, Rwanda has put a 2024–2029 strategic envelope on the table — the Fifth Strategic Plan for Agriculture Transformation, with a five-year resource requirement of RWF 6.6 trillion (about USD 5.1 billion), of which 44% is expected to come from the private sector. That blended-finance design is unusual on the continent, and worth watching. Rwanda is doing more with less, by treating private capital as a primary financing channel rather than a residual one.

Ethiopia: the real-terms decline

Ethiopia’s situation requires careful reading. The country’s federal budget for the 2025/26 fiscal year (Ethiopian FY 2018) was approved at a record 1.93 trillion birr — described as Ethiopia’s largest-ever federal budget, although currency depreciation has substantially reduced its dollar-denominated value. The UNDP Quarterly Economic Profile (August 2025) noted that the dollar value of the Ethiopian federal budget fell from approximately USD 17 billion in 2024/25 to roughly USD 15 billion in 2025/26, despite the nominal increase in birr terms.

More importantly, agriculture-specific allocations have remained flat at around 0.3% of GDP — a level the same UNDP analysis described as reflecting continued fiscal constraints. For a country of more than 120 million people, with agriculture employing the majority of the population and accounting for around 30% of GDP, this is the gap that shapes Ethiopia’s persistent food-security pressure. Birr 900 billion of the federal budget went to a single bond issuance to repay state-owned-enterprise debt; agriculture received a small fraction of that.

Tanzania: the regional outlier

Now place Tanzania next to those four. The Hotuba ya Bajeti tabled in Dodoma on 25 April 2026 by Hon. Daniel Godfrey Chongolo, Waziri wa Kilimo, requested a vote of Tsh 1,105.95 billion for the financial year that begins on 1 July 2026. Vote 43 (Agriculture) takes Tsh 698.99 billion. Vote 5 (Irrigation) takes Tsh 384.29 billion. Vote 24 (Cooperatives) takes Tsh 22.67 billion. The combined ask — equivalent to roughly USD 425 million at prevailing exchange rates — places Tanzania at the top of the East African league table for FY 2026/27 in absolute dollar terms.

More striking is the trajectory. Tanzania’s agriculture budget has grown from Tsh 294 billion in 2021/22 to Tsh 1.19 trillion in 2025/26 — nearly a four-fold increase in five years. The FY 2026/27 ask of Tsh 1.106 trillion is the third consecutive year of trillion-shilling agriculture allocations. About 80% of the request is for development spending: irrigation infrastructure, warehouse construction, laboratory upgrades, seed-system investment, and the Building a Better Tomorrow (BBT) youth and women programme. This is not maintenance budgeting. It is sustained capital formation in the agricultural sector.

The output story is consistent with the input story. Food production has grown from 17.15 million tons in 2020/21 to 23.78 million tons in 2024/25 — an increase of 38.69%. Cash-crop production is up 64% over the same period. Local fertilizer production has grown by 282%. Certified seed production is up 81.49%. National Food Reserve Agency storage capacity has expanded from 251,000 to 776,000 tons, with construction underway to push it past one million. Agricultural exports have moved from USD 2.1 billion in 2021/22 to USD 3.73 billion in 2024/25, against a Vision 2030 target of USD 5 billion. Food self-sufficiency stands at 130%.

Read at the regional level, the Tanzanian budget is not just an outlier in size. It is an outlier in direction.

The Malabo benchmark, and the Kampala pivot

It is worth pausing on the continental benchmark against which all of these budgets are measured. The 2003 Maputo Declaration committed African governments to allocate at least 10% of public expenditure to agriculture and to achieve a 6% annual growth rate in agricultural GDP. The 2014 Malabo Declaration reinforced these targets with a 2025 horizon, adding commitments on hunger eradication and intra-African trade. As 2025 closed, the picture across the continent was sobering. The fourth CAADP Biennial Review revealed that as of 2023, no African Union Member State was on track to meet the Malabo Declaration targets by 2025.

By that benchmark, every East African country I have just discussed — including Tanzania — is missing the mark. Tanzania’s Tsh 1.1 trillion agriculture allocation, set against a national budget that exceeds Tsh 53 trillion, represents roughly 2% of total spending. Kenya’s 47.6 billion is close to 1.1% of its national budget. Uganda is approximately 2%. Rwanda’s overall agriculture envelope, including the input subsidy and MINAGRI core spending, is similar. Ethiopia’s flat 0.3% is well below all of them. The 10% target is, on current trajectories, out of reach for the entire region.

What changed in January 2025 is the framework itself. The Kampala Declaration, adopted at an African Union Extraordinary Summit, retained the 10% budget commitment but added a target to mobilise USD 100 billion in combined public and private investments over the next decade. The 2026–2035 CAADP Strategy and Action Plan, adopted alongside, places more emphasis on private capital mobilisation and on accountability through the Biennial Review process. The continental conversation has moved from public-sector budget shares alone to a blended-finance vision in which public allocations anchor much larger private flows.

Read in that frame, Tanzania’s position is more interesting still. The country is not just spending more public money on agriculture than its neighbours. It is doing so in the explicit context of an Investment Blue Print and Investment Green Print — paired ESG-aligned frameworks designed to mobilise private capital around the corridor agricultural model. The public spending is becoming the anchor for the private mobilisation that the Kampala Declaration calls for. Few countries in the region have aligned their fiscal posture so directly with the new continental architecture.

Why this matters beyond Dodoma

There are three reasons the East African pattern deserves continental attention.

First, food security in the region depends on more than the sum of national agricultural systems. East Africa is highly food-interdependent. Tanzania exports maize, rice and beans to Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. Uganda exports maize, millet and dairy to South Sudan and parts of Kenya. Kenya imports staples from across the region during deficit periods. When a country cuts its agriculture budget, the effect is rarely confined to its own borders. The region’s smaller and more import-dependent economies — particularly the conflict-affected ones — are exposed to the upstream choices made by their larger producing neighbours.

Second, the export trajectory of East African agriculture is now a continental story. Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia together exported well over USD 12 billion in agricultural produce in 2024. The growth rate of those exports — particularly into Asian, Middle Eastern and increasingly intra-African markets — has been consistent for the past decade. Reductions in public investment in production, irrigation, plant-health certification and storage at the national level reduce the export potential at the regional level. Tanzania’s sustained spending is not just a national choice; it is propping up part of the regional export base.

Third, climate adaptation in East African agriculture is now at the point where investment timing matters more than aggregate volume. The drought-affected belts of southern Ethiopia, eastern Kenya, central Tanzania and northern Uganda are not theoretical. Climate-resilient seed varieties, irrigation infrastructure, weather-indexed insurance, soil-health programmes — all of these require sustained investment over 5–10 year cycles to produce results. Budget cuts at this stage interrupt the compounding effect that successful adaptation requires. The countries that hold their nerve through the current fiscal squeeze are the ones whose agricultural systems will be measurably more resilient by 2030.

What Tanzania has not yet solved

It is worth being honest about the limits of the Tanzanian story. The country’s budget execution rates remain a concern — the most recent Hotuba reports a disbursement rate of 42.84% as of March 2026, well below 100% of the planned annual figure. Even a generous trillion-shilling allocation produces results only to the extent it actually reaches the field. The institutional plumbing — the laboratory infrastructure, the cooperative system, the e-Kilimo digital backbone, the BBT-Ugani extension network — is being built in parallel with the spending, which is the right approach, but it means that the productivity payoff from the current investments will play out over years, not quarters.

Tanzania is also not yet at the 10% benchmark. At roughly 2% of national spending, agriculture remains under-funded relative to the continental commitment, even if it is over-funded relative to East African peers. The honest reading is that Tanzania is the regional leader in a region that is collectively under-investing in its most consequential sector.

And there are governance questions ahead. The expansion of digital infrastructure — e-Kilimo now integrated with NIDA, TRA, BRELA, GePG and the cooperative MUVU system — produces a uniquely sensitive concentration of farmer-level data. Tanzania has the Personal Data Protection Act of 2022 in place, but the operational governance of agricultural data within the AgriTech Hub is the kind of issue that deserves more public scrutiny than it has received so far.

The bigger picture

Step back from the country-by-country detail and the continental pattern is clear. African agricultural transformation is no longer principally a matter of declarations. The Maputo declaration is more than two decades old. The Malabo declaration is a decade old. The Kampala declaration is now in its second year. The political language has been settled. What remains is the fiscal arithmetic — and the fiscal arithmetic, in 2025–2026, is being written by national budget cycles in country after country.

On that arithmetic, East Africa is mixed. Kenya and Uganda have cut. Ethiopia is constrained by macroeconomic adjustment. Rwanda is small but disciplined. Tanzania is sustaining at a level that, while still below the Malabo benchmark, is materially above what its peers are spending. In a region where smallholder livelihoods, food prices, climate adaptation and export potential are all intertwined, the choices made in one capital ripple across borders.

If you want to know which East African economy is going to be in the strongest agricultural position in 2030 — measured by production, exports, employment, climate resilience, and the institutional infrastructure that makes those things possible — you will find that the answer is not yet in this year’s headlines. It is in this year’s budgets. And on this year’s budgets, Tanzania is the country that is most clearly playing the long game.

The Tsh 1.1 trillion outlier deserves the continental attention it has not yet received. The decade ahead will reward the countries that have spent it well.

Anthony Muchoki Mwangi is the publisher of 100Africa.com and Kilimokwanza.org, and a Communications Expert at AGCOT Centre. He writes on East African agriculture, development finance, and pan-African policy.

Sources and references

• Tanzania — Hotuba ya Mhe. Daniel Godfrey Chongolo (MB), Waziri wa Kilimo, kuhusu Makadirio ya Mapato na Matumizi ya Wizara ya Kilimo, Mwaka 2026/2027. Tabled 25 April 2026.
• Kenya — Republic of Kenya, Budget Statement FY 2025/26, presented to the National Assembly by Hon. John Mbadi, Cabinet Secretary, National Treasury and Economic Planning, June 2025.
• Kenya — Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA Kenya), Agriculture Sector Budget FY 2025/26 analysis, October 2025.
• Kenya — KPMG East Africa, Kenya 2025/2026 Budget Brief, June 2025.
• Uganda — Republic of Uganda, Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, Budget Speech FY 2025/26, June 2025; MAAIF Ministerial Policy Statement FY 2025/26.
• Uganda — Daily Monitor analysis (June 2025) and The Independent magazine post-budget dialogue coverage (June 2025).
• Rwanda — Government of Rwanda, Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Budget Speech FY 2025/26, presented by Hon. Yusuf Murangwa, June 2025; MINAGRI announcements February 2026.
• Rwanda — PSTA 5 (Fifth Strategic Plan for Agriculture Transformation, 2024–2029), Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, December 2024.
• Ethiopia — Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Ministry of Finance, Budget for FY 2018 (2025/26 Gregorian), tabled June 2025; Addis Standard analysis (July 2025); UNDP Ethiopia Quarterly Economic Profile, August 2025.
• African Union — Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation (2014); Kampala Declaration on Building Resilient and Sustainable Agrifood Systems in Africa (January 2025); CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026–2035.
• AUDA-NEPAD — CAADP Biennial Review reports, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024.