SPADE Case Study in Kisumu, Kenya

Kisumu site visit

Spatial Planning for Agro-business and policy Development, shortened to SPADE, is a programme of
Maseno University in Kisumu, Kenya supported by a consortium of VU Amsterdam, DASUDA, RVO
and Moi University as part of a Nuffic Niche project. Remco Rolvink of VE-R contributes to the
DASUDA partnership with sessions on spatial planning methods. From 13 till 17 May trainings were
given to the staff of Maseno and a large group of Stakeholders during two days of the SPADE Multi-
Stakeholder Platform. This week the programme fully focussed on how to prepare and make the
choice of a Case Study site location. In March the core team already did a first analysis of the region
around Kisumu on topics of fertile lands, main agricultural use, development corridors and key
anchors like research institutes, processing factories and storage capacity. In the May session we
have presented this to the Stakeholder group with County representatives, business community and
non-governmental organisations, followed by multi-criteria analysis in which these stakeholders had
to define the arguments pro and con a series of potential locations. With this informed decision
making method Osiri was chosen as Case Study location and in following sessions we generated as
much potential concepts for development of the site as possible. At the second day the Stakeholders
were taken onto the Osiri site to continue debat, but this time in the actual context. With these
insights an even more firm set of potential concepts were conceived. With these outcomes the Case
Study will be used in upcoming sessions in July and August on Business Development and GIS and a
Spatial Planning exercise will follow to create an integral business case approach and let all
participants experience the power of SPADE to see if many more actual cases can thrive on this, have
courses to train these aspects and in the end create more jobs in a strengthened agricultural value
chains.