East Africa’s finance ministries tabled their budgets on the same day, as tradition dictates and the numbers reveal a region moving in the same direction on agriculture spending, but at very different speeds. Tanzania’s Finance Bill totals 62 trillion shillings ($24.3 billion), a 10% expansion on last year that Keynesian economists will read as a genuine growth signal. Kenya tabled a $37.2 billion bill; Uganda came in at $22.8 billion.
Agriculture, the region’s largest employer drew outsized attention across all three as Tanzania allocated 1.95 trillion shillings ($740 million), Kenya set aside $496 million and Uganda committed $620 million, the largest agricultural allocation in the region’s history. The growth rate story is where the real divergence shows up. Tanzania’s 1.3% increase in agriculture funding is the smallest in the region, despite the overall budget’s credible expansion. Uganda’s agriculture allocation grew 21.6% year-on-year, while Kenya, the region’s economic anchor, posted a 34.5% increase, the standout figure of the cycle.
None of the three has hit the Malabo Declaration’s 10% agriculture-spending target, the 2014 African Union commitment under CAADP designed to drive 6% sectoral growth and shore up food security. Tanzania’s agriculture spend sits at roughly 4% of its national budget, Uganda at 3.0%, and Kenya despite its sharp funding increase at just 2.0%, the lowest in the bloc. The gap matters most for Tanzania: agriculture grew 4.0% in 2025 and contributes 24.6% of GDP, but a 4% budget share makes the government’s 6% growth target look increasingly out of reach.
Structurally, Tanzania’s budget signals a pivot away from heavy transport infrastructure spending toward rural industrialisation, value addition and climate-proofing. It also acknowledges that the Iran-US-Israel conflict has driven fertiliser prices up by more than 50% in some cases, a disruption reported in earlier coverage though the response is limited: no new subsidies, only a commitment to clear arrears owed to fertiliser distributors. Kenya, by contrast, has moved decisively on the input side, allocating $140 million for its fertiliser subsidy programme, $15 million for seed subsidies, and $7.8 million for a coffee seedling programme, a strategy that echoes its 2022 to-date success in bringing down unga (maize flour) prices through input distribution and subsidy support.
Uganda’s allocation is oriented differently again, aiming for a fuller value-chain transformation from primary production toward processed agricultural exports. Spending priorities include agricultural research and development, funding the commercial production of an indigenous anti-tick vaccine and foot-and-mouth disease containment alongside a push to quintuple native seed production and scale processing capacity for priority crops including pulses, oilseeds, cereals and cashews. Investors and policymakers tracking East Africa’s agricultural trajectory, the takeaway isn’t the headline budget growth, it’s the divergence in strategy. Kenya is buying down input costs, Uganda is building toward processing and value addition and Tanzania, despite steady overall budget growth, risks falling further behind on the metric that matters most,which is agriculture’s actual share of the national purse. The final verdict awaits parliamentary approval across all three budgets.
