In late 2024, the European Union’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (EU-DG SANTE) put Eastern Africa’s flower industry under one of the most demanding plant-health audits the sector has faced. The threat was the False Codling Moth, whose larva conceals itself inside a rose bud or capsicum. The EU treats it as a zero-tolerance quarantine pest, such that a single live larva is enough to reject an entire consignment, and inspection rates on high-risk imports had risen from 5% to around 25%.

The numbers explain the alarm. Kenya’s cut flower export earnings slipped from about $567 million in 2023 to roughly $556 million in 2024, a decline the 2025 Economic Survey attributes partly to rising FCM rejections. Flowers remain the country’s most valuable horticultural export, with the Kenya Flower Council putting them at over half of horticulture earnings; and behind the figures sit hundreds of thousands of livelihoods, from farm workers and supervisors to packhouses, freight handlers and input suppliers.

Ethiopia had as much at stake. Floriculture is its second-largest agricultural export, worth some $400 million a year and employing over 200,000 people, and FCM interceptions had already drawn EU warnings. For both countries, failing the audits would have meant suspension from the market that buys most of their flowers.

Passing required a combination of well-run farms and showcasing a national system an external auditor could test and trust, including registered production sites, greenhouse integrity checks, surveillance regimes, pack-house quality control, and end-to-end digital traceability. With funding from the EU and the Mastercard Foundation, TMA worked with Kenya, Ethiopia and Rwanda to build such systems.

At the end of 2025, Kenya and Ethiopia passed the EU-DG SANTE audits, preserving EU access for a combined flower trade worth close to $1 billion a year and the hundreds of thousands of livelihoods behind it. Rwanda is now strengthening its SPS architecture for the next round of audits.

Such success demonstrates that African exporters, with the right systems behind them, can clear the highest bars in global trade. But three countries and one round of audits cannot carry a continent.

Turning isolated breakthroughs into a continental norm is the purpose of ATDF 2026.