Moving the Machine: Why Agricultural Development Fails at Coordination

By Sheena Raikundalia

Four people push a stalled car up a hill. The engine catches, and the car rolls over the top. Who moved it?

All four did. Yet in the development sector, each of them goes home and writes a report claiming the credit, complete with a logo, a headline number and a photograph.

The following year, three of them stop pushing, because their funders want something new. The car rolls back down the hill.

I opened my keynote at the 10th AgriFin Learning Event (ALE2026) in Nairobi with this parable because it names something we rarely discuss. We are far better at funding individual efforts than at making them work together.

The Potato Problem

Consider Kenya’s potatoes. In the year to June 2025, 668.7 gigawatt-hours of geothermal electricity went unused in Kenya, mostly overnight, when demand was low. Meanwhile, in Nyandarua County, which grows about a third of the country’s potatoes, farmers need affordable cold storage to avoid dumping their harvest at the lowest prices of the season.

A cheap source of power sits idle in one place, and a desperate need for cooling sits in another. Yet one cold-storage facility stood unused for years. Another, costing 100 million Kenyan shillings (US$769,200), is still waiting for an operator six years after the project began.

The electricity exists. So do the infrastructure, the farmers and the market. What does not work is the set of connections between them.

Who links surplus power to affordable cooling? Who ties farmers to storage, processors and buyers? Who notices that one facility is sitting empty before another is built?

These are not details to be sorted out after delivery. They are the work that makes the investment worthwhile.

Everyone Succeeds, and the System Fails

The difficulty is structural. Energy companies, county governments, donors, national ministries and private businesses each answer to different mandates and incentives. Each can deliver its own component on time and on budget, and each can report success. The system as a whole can still fail.

That is why Africa’s challenge is not only a problem of resource allocation. Sometimes what looks like scarcity is a coordination problem wearing a resource problem’s clothes.

The Newest Dot on the Map

Artificial intelligence is the latest of these dots and one of the most tempting to fund in isolation. It is easy to see why. A well-built tool can tell a poultry farmer how to feed her birds more effectively. But it cannot make the feed cheaper, get it delivered to her village or ensure there is a buyer for her eggs. Without the surrounding system, even the cleverest technology solves only a small part of the problem.

Asking a Better Question

Funders, governments and practitioners keep asking what is missing: another facility, another pilot, another fund, another technology. The answer is usually yes, and the pipeline of new projects never runs dry.

We should ask a different question: what do we already have that could work better together?

Moving the car once makes a good photograph. Keeping it moving requires someone to take responsibility long after the project closes and the funding has moved on.

That is the work we need to start paying for.

Sheena Raikundalia is an accomplished entrepreneur, former lawyer, government policy advisor, and angel investor with deep expertise across the legal, financial services, and impact investment sectors in Europe and Africa. She has played a pivotal role in advancing Africa’s technology and innovation ecosystems, leveraging a career that spans top-tier London law firms, leadership as Country Director of the UK-Kenya Tech Hub for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and her current position as Chief Growth Officer at agri-tech company Kuza One. Sheena is recognized for her strategic vision, commitment to fostering innovation, and strong advocacy for Africa’s growth potential in technology, entrepreneurship, and impact investment.