For most of the last two decades, Kenya-US trade preferences meant one instrument: the African Growth and Opportunity Act, continuously in force from 2000 and renewed well before each sunset date arrived. That period ended on 30 September 2025, when the prior authorization expired without a renewal in place, and the eighteen months since have been genuinely unsettled.

Since that lapse, Kenya has been through an AGOA-free gap of roughly four months, two separate reauthorizations, a Supreme Court ruling that struck down a different set of US tariffs entirely, at least two more rounds of replacement tariff authority, and the opening of a new bilateral negotiating track that runs alongside, and is not obviously the same thing as, the Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership this firm and many others wrote about in 2023 and 2024. None of this means Kenyan exporters are worse off than they were two years ago in every respect. It does mean that anyone still planning around a 2023-vintage understanding of “how AGOA works” is planning around a picture that no longer exists.

This guide sets out, as precisely as the primary record allows, what is actually true right now: the current legal status of AGOA, what STIP is and is not, what tariff regime Kenyan goods face on entry into the United States today, and what a prudent exporter or investor should be doing given how quickly this picture has moved and may still move again.

Four dates matter more than any other fact in this guide, because everything else in the current landscape sits on top of them.

30 September 2025: lapse. AGOA’s prior authorization expired on this date without Congress passing a renewal beforehand. For the following four months, Kenyan goods that had previously entered the US duty-free under AGOA lost that treatment entirely and reverted to standard tariff schedules. Kenyan apparel and export associations reported that more than 66,000 direct textile and apparel jobs were placed at risk during this window, and Export Processing Zone firms began shedding job openings within weeks of the lapse.

3 February 2026: reauthorization. President Trump signed a one-year reauthorization of AGOA, restoring duty-free treatment through 31 December 2026. Critically, this reauthorization was made retroactive to the lapse date: importers who paid ordinary duties on AGOA-eligible Kenyan goods between 30 September 2025 and 3 February 2026 became eligible to claim refunds, provided they filed within 180 days, with US Customs and Border Protection required to process refunds within 90 days and without interest. The reauthorization also extended the duration of AGOA’s regional apparel and third-country fabric provisions, the rule that lets Kenyan cut-make-trim manufacturers use non-US, non-Kenyan fabric and still qualify for duty-free treatment.

2 September 2026: extension to 2028. Roughly seven months later, and well before this second, one-year term was due to expire, Congress passed and President Trump signed a further two-year extension, carried in H.R. 6500 (the AGOA Extension Act, folded into the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027) after the Senate approved it by a 90-6 margin. AGOA’s current expiry date is now 31 December 2028. Kenya’s Ministry of Investments, Trade and Industry welcomed the extension publicly, and Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui specifically credited it with protecting the more than 66,000 direct jobs in apparel, Kenya’s largest AGOA-dependent sector.

What this timeline does not resolve is why a program renewed for fifteen years in 2015 has now needed emergency reauthorization twice in seven months. Both extensions were short relative to AGOA’s historical pattern, and the administration has been explicit that it intends to use the window before 2028 to “modernize” the program, a process discussed further in Chapter VII.

The Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership is, and always has been, a framework agreement, not a free trade agreement. That distinction matters more now than it did when negotiations opened in 2022, because a separate, differently-named bilateral track has since opened alongside it.

What STIP actually is. Launched in July 2022, STIP was the first initiative of its kind between the US and an African country: a structured dialogue intended to deepen trade and investment ties in areas AGOA does not reach, agricultural and regulatory cooperation, customs and trade facilitation for MSMEs, digital trade, anti-corruption and good regulatory practice, and labor and environmental standards. USTR published summaries of the negotiating text after successive rounds in 2023 and 2024, and the parties held at least seven negotiating rounds across Nairobi and Washington between 2022 and 2025.

A new track, opened after AGOA’s reauthorization. In February 2026, shortly after AGOA’s first reauthorization, Kenya and the US opened consultations toward what both governments are now calling a Framework for a Reciprocal Trade Agreement. The first round concluded in Washington DC on 27 February 2026, led by Kenya’s Secretary for Trade Regina Ombam and the US’s Osvaldo Gómez-Martínez, and covered goods, tariffs, agricultural commodities, services, digital trade, intellectual property, and investment, a broader remit than STIP’s original scope.

AGOA duty-free treatment has never, on its own, told the whole story of what a Kenyan shipment costs to land in the United States. For a stretch of 2025 and 2026, a separate and fast-moving tariff regime sat on top of it, and understanding what happened to that regime matters more to a landed-cost calculation than AGOA’s own status does.

The reciprocal tariff, April 2025. Under an executive order issued in April 2025 and grounded in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the US imposed a “reciprocal” baseline tariff on nearly all trading partners, with Kenya assigned a 10% rate. This tariff applied regardless of AGOA status: an AGOA-eligible Kenyan good still paid the 10% reciprocal tariff, since AGOA preference and the reciprocal tariff operated as two separate, stacked layers rather than alternatives to each other. When AGOA itself lapsed on 30 September 2025, Kenyan exporters faced both exposures at once.

The Supreme Court intervenes, February 2026. On 20 February 2026, the US Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the imposition of tariffs at all, striking down the legal basis for the April 2025 reciprocal tariff order. The administration responded within days by invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a different statutory authority, to impose a new global tariff, again set at 10% for most countries including Kenya. Section 122 authority is capped by statute at 150 days.

Further litigation, then expiry. The Court of International Trade separately invalidated the Section 122 tariffs on 7 May 2026, though its relief applied only to the specific plaintiffs before it; most importers, including those bringing in Kenyan goods, continued paying the tariff while the government’s appeal to the Federal Circuit proceeded. The Section 122 tariff then expired on its own terms on 24 July 2026, when its 150-day statutory window ran out and Congress did not renew it. On the same day, a new set of Section 301 tariffs aimed at forced-labor concerns took effect against roughly 60 economies at rates of 10-12.5%. Kenya does not appear on the list of countries named under that action; the African economies identified in the sources reviewed for this guide are Angola, Nigeria, and South Africa.

AGOA’s benefits in Kenya have never been evenly distributed across the economy. One sector, apparel, has captured the overwhelming share of the value, which is precisely why the events of the last eighteen months hit it hardest.

Apparel and textiles. Kenya’s Export Processing Zones, concentrated around Nairobi and Athi River, built a cut-make-trim apparel industry largely on the strength of AGOA’s duty-free access and its third-country fabric provision. Industry figures cited by Kenyan officials and trade press put more than 66,000 direct jobs, and a considerably larger number of indirect jobs in transport, packaging, and services, on the line during the 2025 lapse. Business Daily reported that EPZ firms shed 5,337 job openings during the period of AGOA uncertainty, and several outlets covering the lapse in real time described factory floors operating on reduced shifts pending clarity on tariff treatment.

Agriculture and horticulture. Kenya’s largest agricultural export categories, cut flowers chief among them, are overwhelmingly EU-bound rather than US-bound, so this segment has been comparatively insulated from the AGOA whiplash described in this guide. Kenya’s Trade Ministry has nonetheless named agricultural value-added products, alongside leather and leather products, pharmaceuticals, and other manufactured goods, as priority areas for expanding US-bound exports now that AGOA’s window has been extended to 2028.

The practical lesson for any exporter reading this guide is sector-specific: if your product line sits in a high-MFN-tariff category, apparel above all, AGOA’s preference margin is large and its loss is correspondingly severe. If your product line already faces a low or zero MFN tariff, AGOA’s marginal value, and therefore your exposure to the events described in Chapters II and IV, is smaller than the headlines might suggest.

Compliance under the current regime asks more of an exporter than it did in the AGOA-only era, not because the underlying rules of origin have changed dramatically, but because they now sit alongside a second, less stable set of rules governing whether an overlay tariff applies at all.

The AGOA baseline. General AGOA eligibility requires that a product be wholly grown, produced, or manufactured in a beneficiary country, or that it contain a specified minimum local or regional value content, generally 35%, with up to 15 percentage points of that able to come from US-origin materials or components. Apparel carries its own, more detailed regime: the third-country fabric provision, preserved and extended as part of the February 2026 reauthorization, allows lesser-developed beneficiary countries including Kenya to use fabric sourced from outside both the US and the beneficiary country and still qualify their finished garments for duty-free treatment, which is the specific provision that made Kenya’s cut-make-trim apparel model viable without a vertically integrated domestic textile industry.

Certificate of origin and domestic administration. Kenyan exporters document AGOA eligibility through a certificate of origin process administered domestically, coordinated between the Kenya Revenue Authority and the Kenya Export Promotion and Branding Agency, alongside the ordinary HS classification work needed to confirm a given product line actually sits on an AGOA-eligible tariff line at the eight-digit level, since AGOA eligibility is product-specific rather than blanket.

Being a listed AGOA beneficiary is not a fixed entitlement. Eligibility is reviewed annually against statutory criteria, rule of law, political pluralism, elimination of trade barriers, poverty reduction, anti-corruption measures, and human rights among them, and can be withdrawn from a country that was previously eligible. Kenya is currently eligible. Whether it remains so is genuinely an open question this year.

USTR opened its 26th annual country eligibility review, covering eligibility for calendar year 2027, with a Federal Register notice published 30 June 2026 and a public hearing held 23 July 2026. Kenyan and international press reporting around that review has described specific scrutiny of the Ruto administration’s governance record, citing allegations of corruption and human rights concerns, as a live factor in how Kenya’s file is being assessed this cycle. Kenya remains on the list of 32 currently eligible sub-Saharan African countries as this guide is written, and no revocation has occurred. But 17 other African countries currently sit outside AGOA for reasons ranging from governance concerns (Ethiopia’s 2022 suspension over the Tigray conflict is the clearest recent precedent) to administrative non-designation, a reminder that the review process is not a formality.

Separately, USTR issued a Federal Register request for public comment in April 2026 on “modernizing” AGOA generally, signaling that the shape of the program itself, not just Kenya’s place within it, may look different by the time the current 2028 extension runs out. Details of what modernization would specifically require of beneficiary countries, and whether it would touch market access, reciprocity expectations, or critical-minerals access, had not been finalized as of this guide’s research date.

Every credible piece of analysis reviewed for this guide, Kenyan government, industry association, and independent research alike, converges on the same recommendation: treat the current AGOA extension as a working window to diversify, not as a reason to defer diversification again.

The EU option is already delivering. The Economic Partnership Agreement between Kenya and the EU has been in force for roughly two years as of mid-2026 and has produced a reported 20% increase in Kenya-EU trade over that period, on a base of roughly $3.8 billion in annual trade that already makes the EU Kenya’s largest single export destination. Kenyan goods receive immediate duty-free, quota-free access to the EU market under the EPA, Kenya supplies more than 40% of all cut flowers imported into the EU, and textile exports under the agreement have also expanded. A separate Kenya-UK Economic Partnership Agreement provides comparable preferential access to the UK market.

AfCFTA is the longer-horizon hedge. The African Continental Free Trade Area offers Kenya preferential access across the continent, and Kenya’s own intra-African export potential under AfCFTA has been estimated at around $1.6 billion by 2030. The Kenya Revenue Authority already administers AfCFTA preferential tariff treatment domestically. Realizing this potential in full still depends on continued regional implementation progress, harmonized rules of origin across member states, and the reduction of non-tariff barriers that remain a documented friction point in intra-African trade, so this is a multi-year opportunity to build toward rather than an immediate substitute for US market access.

The table below compares the settled AGOA-only landscape most exporters planned around before September 2025 against the position verified in this guide as of September 2026.

A working, at-a-glance list of what a Kenyan exporter or US-facing investor should confirm now, given how much of this guide’s landscape has moved within the last eighteen months.

The honest summary of where Kenya-US trade preferences stand in September 2026 is this: AGOA is currently in force, extended to 31 December 2028, and Kenya is currently on the eligible list, entering the US market without the reciprocal or Section 122 tariff overlays that applied for parts of 2025 and 2026. Every part of that sentence has changed at least once in the last eighteen months, and at least two of its components, Kenya’s eligibility review and the Section 122 appeal, remain genuinely open.

STIP has not become a free trade agreement, and the newer Reciprocal Trade Agreement talks opened in February 2026 have not concluded either; neither should be treated as a settled source of market access. What has held steady throughout this period is the underlying advice: know precisely what your product qualifies for today, not what it qualified for last year, keep documentation current, and build market access outside the United States in parallel rather than as an afterthought. Firms that treated AGOA as a fixed, permanent feature of their cost base were the ones most exposed when it briefly disappeared in late 2025. That is the lesson this guide is built to pass on.