The Kenya Living Lab, led by the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), has completed its first six months of intensive field engagement and system development under AfroGrow.

From September 2025 to January 2026, substantial progress was achieved across stakeholder mobilisation, technical development, field assessments, and participatory evaluation.

A central focus during this period was stakeholder engagement and onboarding. Key actors from research institutions, the private sector, policy bodies, and farmer organisations were actively engaged through targeted meetings, consultations, and collaborative activities. This process has strengthened the Living Lab’s multi-actor foundation and reinforced its role as a co-creation space for locally adapted agroforestry solutions.

Substantial progress was also achieved in the development of the crop, livestock, and tree libraries. These libraries compile:

• Species characterisation
• Agronomic and ecological suitability
• Productivity data
• Integration potential within agroforestry systems

The crop portfolio currently includes maize, beans, cowpeas, pigeon peas, and sorghum. Common fruit trees documented in the library include mango, orange, pixie orange, pawpaw, citrus varieties, and banana.

These structured datasets form a technical backbone for informed decision-making and system design within the Living Lab.

The Kenya Living Lab hosted a stakeholder validation workshop to review, refine, and validate the developed species library, ensuring that the documented species profiles accurately reflect local realities, farmer experience, and contextual suitability. Building on this collaborative process, a comprehensive soil assessment was conducted across the Living Lab sites to establish a baseline for land capacity and inform future management planning. This baseline provides a reference point for evidence-based interventions and long-term monitoring of agroforestry performance.

In parallel, a participatory Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) was carried out in collaboration with Living Lab farmers. This exercise enabled the identification et categorisation of farmers according to the scale and intensity of their agroforestry engagement, while also generating practical economic insights from field-level implementation. Complementing these activities, the team engaged in targeted capacity-building efforts aimed at strengthening farmer-led data recording and analysis, reinforcing local data ownership as a prerequisite for adaptive and scalable agroforestry systems.