Browsing: Kenya

Norfund, the Norwegian financial institution, an active strategic minority investor – wholly owned and funded by the Norwegian Government has unveiled its three-year strategy in East Africa. Norfund is a significant investor in the region, having been instrumental in realizing the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project and as a major investor in Equity Bank.

The fund’s new strategy incorporates scaling up investments in the manufacturing and agribusiness sectors, as well as a new investment pillar on green infrastructure, including waste management, access to clean water, transmission lines and power storage.

Norfund has been investing in East Africa for over 20 years with investments in clean energy constituting almost 40% of its portfolio in the region. Some of Norfund’s investments include projects such as Globeleq, Lake Turkana Wind Power, Bujagali Hydro Power and M-KOPA.

The new green infrastructure pillar which includes investments in waste management will complement Norfund’s existing investment focus …

Jumia Kenya has opened up its online platform to brands and corporate organizations for advertising.

In a move to optimise customer data, the company is marketing itself as a highly targeted platform promising great exposure to those who will take up the service.

The company’s CEO, Sam Chappatte, made the disclosure during the launch of Jumia Advertising Services (JAS) on Friday (today).

“20 per cent of active internet users in Kenya are on Jumia each month. We know our customers well – what they shop, how much they spend, etc – and can use this to present relevant adverts to them. This can enable our customers to discover relevant products & services, and will become a powerful digital marketing channel for advertisers,” said Chappatte.

Chappatte emphasized that their messages will reach highly targeted segments, right at the moment of purchase – e.g for DSTV the ads will be presented to …

As of 2018, trade between Pakistan and Africa stood at US$3.6 billion with Pakistan exporting a volume of US$1.4 billion while importing a volume of US$ 2.2 billion from Africa.…

While digital lenders in Kenya have agreed that Kenyans indebted to more than one mobile lending application will no longer continue accessing loans from multiple lenders, the tables are turning.

In what could be a silent coup against these lenders, Kenyans feel that the tactics used by some of them to recover debt are overboard and breach barriers which should not be broken.

The Digital Lenders Association of Kenya’s (DLAK) desire is to have Credit Reference Bureaus (CRB) put in place a mechanism that will enable DLAK’s members to acquire a borrower’s credit history in real-time. The target is to lock out borrowers with poor credit scores if the proposal sails through.

Hostile treatment

However, while this has been done, borrowers feel that some of the lenders have been going overboard and even breaching privacy in their loan recovery mechanisms.

According to Ajua, an Integrated Customer experience company, Kenyans want …

Leading mobile payments company WorldRemit saw a 43% growth in remittances to Africa from higher-income nations in 2019.

The top five countries receiving remittances from the diaspora in 2019 included Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, with Nigeria receiving the most remittances. The top sending countries to the region included the United States, Australia, Canada, and Sweden, with the UK sending the most remittances.

The diaspora plays a key role in Africa’s development story, today the value of remittances is three times larger than official development assistance (ODA) and forecasted to become higher than foreign direct investment for a handful of African countries in 2019.

WorldRemit has disrupted an industry previously dominated by offline legacy players by taking international money transfers online – making them safer, faster and lower-cost. We currently send from 50 to 150 countries, operate in 6,500 money transfer corridors worldwide and employ over 800 people worldwide.

On the …

The Opportunity2030 study shows that Kenya is ripe as a market that can easily accelerate its economic growth going by the needs it has…

Dr. Esther Njoroge-Muriithi is the Vice President and Regional Director for Smile Train Africa.

When we speak of inclusivity in healthcare, cleft lip and palate surgery is often considered a footnote in the priorities given to healthcare financing. Many children with clefts around the world live in isolation, making it difficult to make friends and go to school, but more importantly, have difficulty eating, breathing, and speaking. As we seek to achieve Universal Health Coverage, the long-term benefit of treating a single cleft at an early stage can bring in as much as $50,000 to the economy. This economic benefit therefore deserves to be considered a priority as governments address pediatric surgical care.

The Fourth meeting of the Global Initiative for Children’s Surgery (GICS IV) which took place in Johannesburg from 17^th-18^th January 2019, brought together providers and implementers of surgical services for children, along with health, …

Government officials who nabbed the Lato milk were acting on directions from the presidency…

The financial sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has not been one of the most sought after in the continent. The DRC has 18 banks, five of which are local, four pan-African and nine foreign. The DRC’s ratio of bank assets to GDP at 7% lags regional peers, while only 7% of the population holds a bank account.

Similar to steps taken in markets such as Zambia and Ghana, the Central Bank of Congo (BCC) has directed that all banks must raise their minimum capital to $50 million by the end of 2020. Banks have a number of options, to sell and exit, to merge, to raise capital or to step down the regulatory hierarchy to be a non-bank lender or microfinance institution.

It is such a move that is seeing foreign banks seeking new partnerships and ventures to help them remain in business.

Dutch entrepreneurial development bank …

Slawek Muturi has seen all of it. He has been to each UN-recognized country at least twice, joining a group of just a handful individuals to achieve this fete, and now plans to be the only person to have visited all the 193 countries in a single year when he embarks on his global tour in 2021.

Born in Poland to a Kenyan father and Polish mother, Muturi has carried the country of his father close to his heart. So much has been the love that in several instances, he singlehandedly negotiated trade deals between Poland and Kenya and boosted tourist numbers significantly.

It all started on a chilly October morning of 2004. Though Muturi had grown and schooled in Kenyan schools including Kenyatta Mwatate, Alliance High School and prestigious St Mary School, he had not reached a level where he would interact with senior government officials.

On this October, …