How cotton business can boost farmers and support healthcare

As a Standard Four school pupil, my class visited a cotton spinning factory in the then Central Province as part of our agriculture “fact finding” mission. This was in Kenya’s cotton era where several ginneries and other spinning factories around the country were also operational.

Decades later, instead of building on this impressive foundation, we are a pale shadow of the ‘80s. Of course global trade and socioeconomic shifts had a role to play, but local politics, cronyism, nepotism alongside corruption dealt the killer blow to the industry.