French Beans Value Chain Development; Muranga County

Vision: Making Murang’a County the preferred county for high quality and commercially competitive French beans products in the world.

Objective of Value Chain improvement
The main objective of the French Beans Action Plan is to ensure that the county becomes the preferred source for high quality and commercially competitive French beans products through sustainable quality improvement in the production and value addition of the beans.

Strategic Action Plan for French Beans Value Chain
The Strategic Action Plan for FB/SP Value Chain was a tool that plotted out far-reaching activities to be planned for and implemented for the next three years (2014 – 2017) specifically to address issues of FB value chain in Murang’a County. Effectively the VC actors and stakeholders needed to collaborate, learn through sharing experiences and adopting best practices to achieve the desired outputs in Strategic FB/SP Action Plan.

Specifically the Plan aimed to:

Strengthen institutional framework for then French Beans Value Chain operations.
Mainstream Gender and Social Inclusion in the French Beans Value Chain;
Develop capacity of the French Beans Value Chain actors and introduce appropriate new technologies for the VC.
Facilitate the development of PACK HOUSES for quality assurance measures through value adding.
Support the establishment of quality inputs supply mechanisms and a quality production monitoring system.
To achieve the mentioned targets some Key thematic areas of the French beans VC were identified as follows:
1. Quality Inputs and the quality control regulations
2. French Beans marketing groupings, regulations and market information
3. Farmers’ knowledge and skills in horticultural production(French beans)
4. Infrastructure challenges (Pack Houses and all weather roads).
5. Gender inclusion and participation particularly women and youth.

French Beans Value Chain –Murang’a Success Story

Previous status
a) Pesticide abuses and non – conformity to MRLs
b) Price stagnation despite increase in cost production
c) French beans marketing value chain actors were not well organized
d) Linkages between the value chain actors to markets were weak
e) Poor marketing information and market limitations
f) Pests and diseases
g) Infrastructure challenges (Poor access roads and lack of post-harvest handling and processing facilities)
h) High cost of attaining and maintaining accredited international export standards (I.e. Global GAP
i) Limited access to financial services

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