Category: Business Daily

Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Safaricom customers doubt the accuracy of what they are charged for mobile data and text messages, according to a regulatory survey that has put the spotlight on billing practices in Kenya’s telecommunications sector.

The survey shows that only 77 percent and 77.7 percent of Safaricom customers believe they are accurately billed for data and texts, respectively, with the telco lagging behind Jamii Telecommunications, Airtel and Telkom Kenya on billing credibility.

An eight-year freeze on new power purchase agreements (PPA) has left Kenya teetering on the brink of a crisis with Kenya Power forced to ration electricity in some parts of the country to protect the grid whenever demand peaks in the evening.

The Ministry of Energy and Petroleum describes 2026 as pivotal in the quest to start growing local generation and ensure that the country does not continue to overly rely on neighbouring economies, mainly Ethiopia and Uganda.

The government has rolled out a plan to sell its stake in several commercial public corporations as part of a new framework for funding future public projects.

In the pipeline for privatisation are more than 200 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other companies where the State has ownership stakes, with 45 of the entities lined up for the first phase of divestiture.

Many traders in Kenya learn about partial closing after they have already experienced the frustration of watching a winning trade turn back to breakeven. It feels painful to see price move strongly in your favour and then erase most of the profit because there was no clear plan to secure gains along the way. Partial close plans with equal pip blocks can turn that emotional experience into a structured routine.

For traders in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and other towns, using a pip calculator is a practical way to translate distance on the chart into money terms. When you know the value of each pip for your lot size and pair, you can divide the trade into equal pip blocks and decide exactly where and how much to close without guessing.

Why Partial Close Plans Matter For Kenyan Traders

Before diving into the steps, it helps to see why a partial close method can be useful in the Kenyan context. Many local traders are balancing trading with work, business or studies, and they cannot watch the screen all day. A clear plan helps remove panic decisions when price moves fast.

Key benefits of partial close planning include:

Reducing the emotional pressure of trying to pick a perfect top or bottom

Locking in some profit at earlier milestones while still leaving part of the trade open

Smoothing the equity curve when markets are choppy or news-driven

Allowing traders who use small accounts in Kenyan shillings to protect gains even on modest moves

For someone trading from Nairobi in the evening during London and New York sessions, this structure can make the difference between a stressful and a disciplined approach.

Step 1: Understand Pips And Equal Pip Blocks

Equal pip blocks simply mean dividing your planned move into segments of the same pip size. To do that with confidence, you need to be clear on what a pip is for the pairs you trade and how that translates into value for your lot size.

For most major pairs:

A pip is the fourth decimal place, for example from 1.2000 to 1.2001

Some brokers display an extra digit called a pipette, but the basic pip is usually the second digit from the right

For pairs where one side is JPY:

A pip is the second decimal place, for example from 150.20 to 150.21

Once you know how pips are counted, you can think of a trade in blocks, such as three blocks of 20 pips each or four blocks of 25 pips each, depending on your target distance. This is the foundation for a partial close plan that feels clear rather than random.

Step 2: Use The Pip Calculator To Map Your Blocks

The next stage is to turn that pip distance into actual currency values. This is where the calculator becomes important for Kenyan traders who might hold accounts in dollars while thinking in Kenyan shillings.

You can follow a simple routine:

Choose the pair you plan to trade, for example, EURUSD or GBPUSD.

Enter your lot size and account currency into the online tool.

Note the pip value that the calculator outputs.

Multiply this pip value by the size of each pip block you plan to use.

If the calculator shows that one pip is worth 1 dollar for your position size, then a 20 pip block equals 20 dollars and a 60 pip full target equals 60 dollars. With this information, you can design partial closes that match your financial goals and risk tolerance instead of guessing based on the chart alone.

Step 3: Decide How Much To Close At Each Block

Once your pip blocks are defined in both pip and money terms, you can design how much of the position to close at each stage. Many Kenyan traders like simple percentages that are easy to remember when markets are moving quickly.

Common examples include:

Close one-third of the position at the first block

Close another third at the second block

Leave the final third to run toward the full target or until a trailing stop is hit

Another option is to close a small portion early, such as 25 percent, then 50 percent at the next block, and leave 25 percent for a bigger move. The exact split depends on your personality and the volatility of the pairs you trade.

The key is consistency. By writing down your percentages and linking them to fixed pip blocks, you avoid random closing decisions that change from one trade to the next.

Step 4: A Practical Kenyan Example With Numbers

Imagine a trader in Nairobi with a 1 000 dollar account who wants to risk 2 percent on a EURUSD trade. After checking the calculator, they find that one pip for their chosen lot size equals 1 dollar.

They plan a long trade with:

Stop loss 30 pips below entry

Target 60 pips above entry

They decide to divide the 60 pip target into three equal blocks of 20 pips. This gives them:

Block 1 at 20 pips profit, worth 20 dollars

Block 2 at 40 pips profit, worth 40 dollars

Block 3 at 60 pips profit, worth 60 dollars

Their partial close plan could be:

At +20 pips, close one third of the position and move stop loss to breakeven

At +40 pips, close another third and lock in profit on the remaining part by trail stop under recent structure

Let the final third aim for the full 60 pips or exit based on a trailing stop or reversal signal

Because they know the money value of each block from the calculator, this trader can assess in advance whether the potential gain justifies the risk they are taking.

Step 5: Adjusting For Local Conditions And KES Thinking

Even if your trading account is denominated in dollars or euros, your real life expenses are likely in Kenyan shillings. Converting planned profits and losses into KES can make decisions feel more concrete.

For example, if each 20 pip block is worth 20 dollars and the current USDKES rate is around a certain level, you can estimate the shilling amount for each partial close. This helps you answer questions such as:

Is the first partial close at least worth the time and risk of taking the trade

Does the full plan support your monthly or weekly income goals from trading

Kenyan traders should also consider local internet stability and power reliability. If conditions are uncertain, you may choose slightly closer pip blocks or higher early partial close percentages so that more of the profit is locked in earlier.

Common Mistakes When Using Pip-Based Partial Closes

Partial close plans are useful, but they can be misapplied. Some errors show up often in real trading.

Watch out for:

Changing block sizes in the middle of a trade because of fear or greed

Ignoring your original stop loss and letting the trade run far against you after a small partial profit

Using blocks that are too small, which leads to many micro decisions and high transaction costs

Forgetting to update the pip calculator when you change lot size or move to a different pair

By avoiding these mistakes, you keep your system clean and easier to review in a journal.

Recent enforcement actions by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner against businesses sending unsolicited marketing and promotional messages have sparked animated debate across Kenya’s SME ecosystem.

On one side are those who argue that the regulator is simply doing its job, upholding the law and protecting consumer rights. On the other hand, some businesses argue that they are misunderstood, asserting that consent is implicitly granted during routine mobile money transactions and that the backlash is disproportionate.

This tension is understandable. But it risks obscuring the more important reality that compliance is the gateway to a more sustainable, trusted, and effective digital marketing ecosystem.

I agree with the regulator’s position that payment interactions do not constitute ‘express, unequivocal, free, specific and informed’ consent, and this is supported by how people actually behave and expect.

When a consumer is settling a bill, buying airtime, or completing any transaction, their cognitive focus is on the fulfilment, not future marketing engagement. Treating this moment as implicit permission for ongoing promotional messaging is wrong.

Global privacy norms have long drawn a clear boundary between the two, and Kenya is aligning with that direction. Importantly, this clarity benefits businesses in the long run. Ambiguous consent creates legal risk, customer resentment, and inconsistent enforcement.

While regulatory fines can be severe enough to cripple small businesses, they are only the visible tip of the issue. Less discussed but equally damaging are blacklisting by mobile operators or aggregators, suspension by payment service providers, reputational damage, and loss of trust that depresses repeat business. Unstructured, consent-light marketing practices do not scale and present a high risk to the business.

The reality is that first-party data, particularly payment data, remains one of the most valuable assets a business can hold, provided it is used correctly. The shift required is insight-based engagement.

Payment data can inform: product affinity trends, timing and seasonality patterns, customer value segments, and demand forecasting, all without directly messaging individuals or exposing personal identifiers.

Aggregation, pseudonymisation, and minimisation are the design principles Consider a local supermarket. The compliance-heavy ‘old way’ involves using phone numbers from mobile money transactions to blast a generic ‘Fresh Bread’ SMS to their entire base, most of whom are not currently hungry.

The privacy-first approach looks different. By analysing basket value data, they realise that 60 percent of Friday evening customers also buy milk. Instead of spamming, they run a geo-targeted ad for the combo on a delivery app or social media during breakfast hours.

A hardware store does not need to text a past customer to generate a sale. Instead of sending an unsolicited SMS about paint discounts to everyone who bought a hammer last year, the store can analyse its aggregated data to spot a trend: paint sales peak during the first weekend of the month.

Using this insight, they can place a sponsored tile on a utility payment app during that specific window. The customer sees the offer when they are already in a ‘household management’ mindset, transforming the ad from a distraction into a helpful suggestion.

There is a broad middle ground where businesses can still achieve discovery, conversion, and growth without violating consent.

Privacy-preserving alternatives include: contextual and interest-based advertising, sponsored placements within trusted platforms, reward-based engagement models, and opt-in discovery environments where users choose to engage.

When implemented well, privacy-preserving digital marketing aligns incentives across the ecosystem. Businesses reduce regulatory risk, improve return on marketing spend, and gain clearer attribution.

Consumers experience fewer intrusive messages, greater control, and better discovery of relevant products and services. Regulators see higher baseline compliance, fewer complaints, and proof that innovation can coexist with strong protections.

This is already happening with localised solutions duly aligned to the Data Protection Act as data processors and controllers designing specifically for mobile-first, cost-sensitive markets.

That said, copy-pasting global compliance or marketing models into African markets rarely works. SMEs operate with thin margins, limited legal support, and heavy reliance on mobile infrastructure.

Effective compliance tooling must therefore be affordable, automated, and embedded into everyday business workflows. Local solutions understand these realities and translate regulation into usable systems.

Many compliance failures stem not from bad intent but from poor experience design. Clear consent flows, transparent value exchange, and simple opt-out mechanisms are conversion and trust optimisers.

Designing for user choice reduces complaints, increases engagement quality, and creates defensible audit trails. Years of unchecked unsolicited messaging have degraded the value of mobile channels. Restoring signal over noise ultimately benefits legitimate businesses and consumers alike.

Effective marketing does not require knowing who someone is. Relevance can be driven by context, moment, content adjacency, and aggregated behavioural signals. The future belongs to discovery engines that respect privacy while delivering commercial outcomes.

For regulators, businesses, and consumers alike, the path forward is collaborative. Regulators should continue pairing enforcement with guidance and ecosystem engagement.

Businesses should modernise marketing practices proactively, before enforcement forces the issue. Consumers should recognise that ethical marketing enables innovation, choice, and economic participation.

The objective is to enable respectful relevance where discovery thrives, trust is preserved, and the digital economy grows on solid foundations.

The businesses that adapt today will own the customer trust of tomorrow.

The modest setting of the Mombasa Magistrate’s Court, where Yusuf Abubakar Joho is testifying as a prosecution witness, provides can’t hint of the billions of shillings at stake-until the Mining Cabinet Secretary’s brother begins to speak.

Mr Abubakar-popularly known as Abu-speaks with intensity about the long-running battle his family has fought with one of the most powerful men in Kenya. Mohammed Jaffer, a reclusive billionaire who styles himself as the ‘port man,’ has over the years entrenched his commercial dominance at the country’s largest port, retaining an iron grip over critical import infrastructure.

On the second day of 2026, collapse of a multi-storey building in Nairobi’s South C Estate dampened the positive mood that characterised the festive season.

As Kenyans slowly return to work and begin implementing New Year’s resolutions, the disaster once again places all stakeholders in the building and construction space in the spotlight.

Collapse of the 16-storey building, which was still under construction, comes a month into the December 2025 discovery of yet another structure in Parklands, Nairobi with visibly cracked columns.

In 2026, one of the resolutions that all stakeholders in the building and construction industry, spanning real estate investors and steel manufacturers to building contractors, engineers, architects, enforcement agencies and even those in the cement manufacturing arena, must make is to be our brothers’ keepers. So far, there are scant details on fatalities.

However, the magnitude of the collapse is serious enough to warrant a sector and industry-wide review of the current Building and Construction Operating Practices.

We can no longer afford to call a spade a big spoon. These incidents are not acts of nature and must be called out for what they are: professional negligence, leading to preventable tragedies.

Professional negligence in the building and construction sector, unlike in the medical world, is normally a chain of events. A chain comprising several, but interlinked, parties; the contractor, civil/structural engineers, architects, county approving officials as well as inspection and surveillance officers at the National Construction Authority (NCA), among others.

These parties bear a cardinal responsibility and obligation to ensure that buildings under construction adhere to stipulated construction and public safety standards.

Such responsibility behooves them to maintain strict surveillance to ensure that approved designs are translated to physical structures under their supervision.

The professionals, including site clerk of works reporting to the site civil/structural engineer and architect, must also ensure the use of quality materials.

There can be no denying that the proliferation of substandard materials and non-compliance with design requirements are contributing factors to the poor structural integrity of these collapsing buildings.

The only way to ensure use of quality materials is to rely on laboratory-certified materials, from cement and concrete to steel and aggregates.

The NCA must be adequately resourced to enforce the Kenya National Accreditation Service for building materials testing services, as a measure to address the decline in quality of materials being introduced to the market.

This year, all building and construction stakeholders must make a new year’s resolution to ensure proper materials testing, accurate traceability, and professional supervision as part of a mission to be our brother’s keeper in the new year and beyond.

Traceability of all materials and professional supervision for all building construction projects must be strictly enforced as a matter of life and death.

It cannot continue to be a poorly kept secret that substandard steel, paints, cement, electrical wires and even timber and related materials are readily available in this market.

Nairobi City County’s drainage system is in a dire and unacceptable state for a capital city that aspires to be a regional and international hub. The slightest amounts of rain can suffice to bring major roads, walking paths, estates, and business areas to a standstill.

Flooded streets have become a routine occurrence rather than an exceptional event, exposing a long-standing failure in urban planning, infrastructure maintenance, and intergovernmental coordination.

For a city that hosts multinationals, diplomatic missions, and regional headquarters, this reality undermines Nairobi’s credibility as a serious destination for investment, tourism, and global business.

The economic consequences of poor drainage are substantial. When roads become impassable, productivity declines as workers arrive late or fail to report to work altogether.

Businesses lose the opportunity to make a profit because supply chains are disrupted, customers cannot reach the businesses, and properties are destroyed. Informal traders, who rely on daily mobility and foot traffic, are often the hardest hit.

Flooding also increases vehicle maintenance costs, accelerates infrastructure deterioration, and raises insurance risks. Over time, these inefficiencies translate into higher costs of doing business, discouraging local enterprise growth and foreign direct investment.

The drainage crisis poses a severe threat to people beyond the economy. Blocked drains, broken sewer lines and illegal connections often result in floodwaters in Nairobi, mixed with raw sewage.

This provides a perfect environment where water-borne diseases thrive, including cholera, typhoid and dysentery. Children and people in informal settlements are the most vulnerable groups who incur the most.

When citizens are exposed to health hazards that are preventable due to the failure of the simplest structures, the city cannot boast of improvement or even global competitiveness.

At the core of the problem is not merely rainfall intensity, but weak governance. Nairobi’s drainage system suffers from outdated designs, poor enforcement of building regulations, encroachment on riparian reserves, inadequate maintenance, and fragmented responsibility between county and national agencies.

Poor connections and drains that are either too small or loaded with solid waste also portray weaknesses in the waste management and social responsibility.

Climatic changes have also enhanced the pattern of rainfall, and it is high time to redesign the drainage system to sustain and not provide temporary solutions.

To overcome this crisis, the Nairobi City County Government needs to prioritise the treatment of drainage as an important economic and social health concern rather than as a normal routine of public works.

To begin with, the county must carry out a complete drainage master plan in line with contemporary international standards, which incorporate stormwater management, sewerage, road layouts, and land use planning.

This should be an information-based theory, which will overlay the areas susceptible to floods and increase the drainage capacity to withstand the impacts of extreme weather.

Second, the county should institutionalise routine desilting and maintenance as well as establish good performance standards and a transparent procurement process.

Illegal dumping and building of drainage corridors should be strictly enforced. Enforcement should be accompanied by awareness of the populace to ensure that they have a civic sense of waste disposal.

The national government also has a critical role to play. Since Nairobi is the capital city and the economic hive, it is reasonable to have national support in terms of funding, technical expertise and programs on climate-resilient infrastructures.

There should also be the strengthening of coordination between the Ministry of Transport, Housing and Urban Development, Water and Sanitation agencies and the county government to avoid duplication and policy gaps.

The bottom line is, a functional drainage system is not a luxury, but it is the cornerstone of urban efficiency, personal wellbeing and national identity. If Nairobi is to position itself as a true international destination city, fixing its drainage system is both an urgent necessity and a test of leadership, governance, and long-term economic vision.

The Treasury has issued draft rules guiding how investors will raise funds through initial coin offerings, allowing firms to issue their own digital currencies for investors to buy.

An initial coin offering (ICO) involves a company raising funds by giving investors tokens for their cash or cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, as opposed to obtaining shares in the company through a traditional approach, such as an initial public offering (IPO).

The beginning of the year is a season of strategy. Boardrooms are busy approving budgets, refining targets, and aligning teams around priorities that will drive performance. Finance, operations, marketing, and human resources all make their case for investment. Climate action must now be treated the same way.

For too long, climate considerations have been parked under corporate social responsibility or glossy sustainability reports. That approach is no longer tenable. Climate action is no longer a ‘nice to have’. It is a business necessity.

Public policy is making this clear. In a landmark move last year, the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) launched the Kenya Green Finance Taxonomy alongside the Climate Risk Disclosure Framework.

This signalled a decisive shift in how climate issues are viewed in the financial system. Climate risk is now formally recognised as a material financial risk that must be identified, assessed, and disclosed with the same seriousness as credit, liquidity, or operational risk.

For companies, the implications are immediate. As banks and financial institutions align with the CBK framework, scrutiny will increasingly extend to businesses seeking financing.

Firms will be expected to demonstrate how climate risks affect their operations and how they are managing them. Those without credible climate strategies may find access to capital more constrained or more expensive.

Those that can align with the Green Finance Taxonomy will be better positioned to attract sustainable finance and investment.

The business case goes beyond compliance. Climate risk is already disrupting supply chains, damaging infrastructure, increasing insurance costs, and affecting worker productivity.

Floods, droughts, and heat stress translate directly into higher costs and lower revenues. Ignoring these realities in corporate planning is equivalent to neglecting market volatility or regulatory change.

There is also a strong opportunity story. The Kenya Green Finance Taxonomy provides clarity on what qualifies as green and transition activities, opening pathways to new products, services, and financing options.

Investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable sourcing, circular economy models, and nature-based solutions reduce operating costs while creating long-term value.

Regulation will continue to tighten, not loosen. Companies that integrate climate action early can spread costs over time, strengthen governance systems, and avoid abrupt compliance shocks. Those who delay risk being forced into reactive and costly adjustments.

Talent, reputation, and competitiveness are also at stake. Employees, customers, and partners increasingly favour organisations that demonstrate credible climate leadership. A strong climate strategy strengthens brand value and helps attract and retain skilled professionals.

As companies plan for the year ahead, the question is no longer whether climate action belongs on the agenda. The question is whether it is being treated with the same discipline, investment, and accountability as every other core business function. Climate action is now a business case that companies can no longer afford to ignore.