POLICY BRIEF; Smart Agriculture as a Strategic Instrument for Reducing Urban–Rural Disparities in Land Use Efficiency in Kenya's Coast Region

1. Executive SummaryKenya's six coastal counties — Mombasa, Kwale, Kilifi, Tana River, Lamu, and Taita-Taveta — exhibit a persistent and widening gap between the efficiency with which urban land is used (dense, high-value, infrastructure-serviced) and the efficiency with which rural agricultural land is used (extensive, low-input, poorly serviced, and increasingly fragmented). This disparity undermines food security, drives unplanned rural-urban migration, and weakens the region's contribution to national and county development goals, including Vision 2030's economic pillar and the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda's agriculture value chain.Smart and digital agriculture — precision input management, mobile-based extension and market linkage, digital land and tenure records, remote-sensing-based land monitoring, and e-governance of agricultural value chains — offers a credible strategic lever for narrowing this gap without requiring rural land to replicate urban land-use intensity. The comparative and cross-country evidence base (including digital rural construction studies from China, smart territorial restructuring pilots in the EU, and Kenya's own mobile-money and e-extension experience) consistently associates digital agricultural transformation with improved land use efficiency, particularly where digital skills, tenure security, and market access improve together rather than in isolation.This brief argues that Kenya's coast region has the pre-conditions to convert this evidence into practice — mobile penetration, an active devolution architecture, and an existing inter-county coordination body (JKP) — but lacks a shared governance instrument to sequence and finance smart agriculture investment across counties. It proposes the Smart Agriculture Land-Use Convergence Framework (SALCF) as that instrument, structured around six pillars: digital land information and tenure; precision and climate-smart production technology; digital extension and market access; digital and physical infrastructure equity; county-level digital agriculture governance; and blended financing anchored in the existing Blue Finance Mobilisation Model (BFMM). The brief closes with a three-horizon implementation roadmap, an institutional map, an M&E framework built around a Land Use Efficiency Convergence Index, and risk mitigation measures.