Kenya’s export earnings dropped in the first half of 2025, the first such fall in six years, mainly due to reduced tea sales, widening the country’s goods trade deficit to Sh783.91 billion.
Data collated by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) indicates total exports fell to Sh554.08 billion in the period between January and June, down from Sh571.6 billion in the same period last year.
The 3.06 percent decline has broken a five-year streak of growth, underlining Kenya’s vulnerability to swings in international commodity markets and reliance on a few countries for the bulk of its largely raw agricultural exports.
The KNBS numbers, based on trade data captured at border points by the Kenya Revenue Authority, indicate the exports were largely weighed down by tea, whose earnings contracted by double-digit rates.
Kenya’s tea, whose top destinations include Pakistan, the UK, and Egypt, fetched Sh90.12 billion in the six months, down 12.05 percent from record Sh102.47 billion during a similar period in 2024.
This marked the first contraction in earnings from tea exports, also used to blend inferior varieties in other countries, since the same period of 2019 when earnings dropped 23.80 percent to Sh56.46 billion.
The data shows exports volume and value of Kenya’s tea both tumbled, with 315,036 tonnes of the commodity sold abroad compared with 320,564 tonnes a year ago—a marginal 1.72 percent dip.
Average prices at the Mombasa Tea Auction also softened in the review half-year period, falling 3.64 percent year-on-year.
“For the first half of 2025, the average auction price stood at $2.12 per kg compared to $2.20 per kg recorded in the corresponding period of 2024,” the KNBS wrote in the Leading Economic Indicators June 2025 report.
The poor show from tea weighed down gains from coffee, whose earnings surged 83.68 percent to Sh35.38 billion during the review period from Sh19.26 billion a year earlier.
Earnings from exports of cut flowers also rose by nearly a fifth (19.48 percent) to Sh47.08 billion, while fruits, including avocado, earned the country a record Sh29.27 billion, a 32.69 percent jump from the same period last year.
Earnings from the export of vegetables, however, declined for the second year running, fetching Sh10.91 billion in the six months, a 7.84 percent hit from Sh11.84 billion a year ago.
While total exports, which include re-exports, faltered for the first time since 2019 when they dropped 5.20 percent to Sh303.34 billion, Kenya’s import bill held steady.
Orders of largely industrial supplies, petroleum products, and machinery such as vehicles increased a measly 0.1 percent to nearly Sh1.34 trillion in the first six months of 2025.
The result was a Sh783.91 billion goods trade deficit—gap between exports and imports—an increase of 2.47 percent over Sh765.02 billion in the same period of last year, and the highest since Sh814.02 billion in the first half of 2022.
Economists reckon that a widening deficit will exert pressure on the shilling if sustained, denying the growing youthful population jobs and inflating the cost of servicing Kenya’s foreign debt. Kenya has, over the years, struggled to sustainably narrow goods trade deficit partly due to reliance on traditional farm produce exports such as tea, horticulture and coffee, which are largely sold raw and they hence fetch relatively lower earnings.
Most Kenyan traders export raw produce because of higher taxes slapped on semi-processed or processed products in destination markets such as Europe, fearing that value-added goods will attract tariffs and make the consignments less competitive in the global markets.
