Who Holds the Coffee Money?

By Kilimo News November 2, 2026 By Henry Kinyua

When the furrow runs dry, a wise farmer walks upstream before cursing the sky. The other day I met a young woman whose father grows coffee in Murang’a, and she was upset. She said the government takes far too long to pay coffee farmers and still doesn’t pay them enough.

I hear this complaint often, and it rests on a belief worth correcting. Under Kenya’s current coffee marketing system, no government agency holds a single shilling of the farmer’s money.

So I walked her upstream, and today I repeat that walk here.

Kenyan coffee is produced by cooperatives and estates. It leaves their hands through one of two doors: the weekly auction at the Nairobi Coffee Exchange (NCE), or a direct sale to a buyer outside the country. Through either door, the buyer pays the cooperative or estate, not the government.

At the NCE, coffee is sold every Tuesday. Buyers then pay into a Direct Settlement System account held at Co-operative Bank or Stanbic Bank. From that account, the costs of service providers such as millers, marketing agents and warehousemen are deducted and paid out, and the balance goes straight to the farmers’ accounts.

The system is also open to scrutiny. The NCE publishes its sales reports on its website, so anyone can see what a cooperative’s coffee fetched. The KilimoNews App https://app.kilimonews.co.ke consolidates that NCE data so a farmer, or a farmer’s daughter, can trace their own coffee lot by lot. Her father’s cooperative is called Gakui

We opened the app and looked up her father’s society, Gakui in Murang’a. In the season just ended, Gakui sold 52,979 kg of coffee at an average of $306 per bag, about Ksh 121 per kilo of cherry. That is roughly 10% below the Murang’a County average of $339 and 9% below the national average of $338.

The grade breakdown told us why. Gakui’s top three grades by volume were MH, AB and AA. A full 33% of Gakui’s coffee was MH (Mbuni Heavy), which averaged just $235 a bag. AB made up 28% at $369, and AA only 13% at $407. Mbuni sold for about 36% less than AB, and with a third of the crop in that grade, it dragged the whole average down.

The lesson is plain. Gakui’s price problem was settled long before the Tuesday auction, in how cherry is picked, delivered and processed.

It was an eye-opener for her. She promised to sit down with her father, look at the numbers together, and put more effort into the family’s coffee.

The wider point is worth repeating. Today’s legal and policy framework makes it easy to enter the coffee value chain and operate at any stage: grower, miller, broker, dealer, warehouseman, export agent or trainer. At none of these stages does the government keep anyone’s money.

So when a payment is slow, or a price is low, the first questions belong closer to home: at the cooperative office, with the service providers, and in the cherry basket itself. The cheque, it turns out, is often written on the farm. Are your parents coffee farmers? Which cooperative do they deliver their coffee to? How much were they paid last season?

Visit the KilimoNews App and follow how much their coffee fetched.

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