Bashir Hussein Mohamed^1,, Stephen M. A. Muathe¹, James M. Kilika¹

Kenya's poultry sector contributes materially to agricultural output and food security, yet its registered firms have struggled to grow, held back by costly feed, import competition, disease risk and loose links between processors and the producers who supply them. Contract farming, a standing agreement under which an integrating firm provides inputs, technical support and a guaranteed market while a producer commits to agreed volumes and standards, is widely proposed as a remedy, but the factors that shape the growth of poultry businesses in Kenya have attracted little quantitative study. This study treats contract farming as the contractual, most structured form of value-chain networking and asks whether such networking is among the factors affecting business growth in Kenya, drawing on the nineteen registered firms of Nairobi City County. Anchored on the Upper Echelon Theory, Strategic Leadership Theory and the Resource-Based View, and adopting a descriptive and explanatory cross-sectional survey design, it draws on a proportionate stratified random sample of 209 top echelon and business unit managers, 200 of whom responded, and measures networking through communication, negotiation, shared resources and trust. The firms engaged in networking at a high level (M=3.98; SD=1.007), and multiple regression placed networking as the strongest leadership-driven contributor to firm performance (β=0.282; p<0.05) within a model explaining 72.5% of the variation in performance (Adjusted R²=.725). The correlational evidence pointed the same way (r=.665; p<0.01), and managers' own accounts described growth flowing from supply-chain coordination, negotiated agreements and trusted partnerships with suppliers, research institutions and government bodies, precisely the relationships contract farming formalizes. The study concludes that coordinated, contract-based relationships are among the genuine drivers of poultry business growth, and it advances policy measures, a supportive contractual and dispute-resolution framework, incentives for integrator-producer schemes, and multi-stakeholder platforms linking government, the Food and Agriculture Organization and firms, to help the sector convert coordination into sustained expansion.

contract farming, value-chain networking, vertical coordination, poultry business growth, strategic leadership, agribusiness policy, Kenya