Category: Business Daily

Last week, while attending the International Trade Fair at the Nairobi Showground, my attention was caught by the impressive section of the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF).

For many of us, the KDF is synonymous with the battlefield, safeguarding our borders, protecting our sovereignty, and keeping the nation secure. What drew my attention, however, was something that speaks to the future of national protection: the Environmental Soldier Programme.

The State has dangled 21-year renewable leases as it races to woo investors to take up 25,000 acres of land within the Bura Irrigation Scheme for commercial sugarcane production, as part of a wider strategy to generate revenue from idle public assets.

The Bura scheme has a total of 296,000 acres, of which 12,000 acres have been developed, and 6,000 acres are actively under production for rice and maize.

The number of Kenyans lacking sufficient food has increased by 14.6 percentage points in less than a decade, reaching the highest level in 25 years, according to a new survey.

The 2025 Global Hunger Index (GHI) reports that 36.8 percent of Kenyans-approximately 20 million people-are undernourished, meaning they do not consume enough food to meet their basic daily energy needs.

In Kenya the affordable housing conversation has often been framed as a social imperative and rightly so. But what if building homes was also the most powerful way to build our country’s industries? Housing is the single most practical industrial policy the country can execute over the next 25 years and beyond.

Kenya’s housing deficit is often estimated at about two million units, with some 250,000 homes needed annually against a supply of approximately 50,000.

This figure does not include the secondary deficit arising from the need to replace poorly constructed buildings developed in the last two decades. It also doesn’t factor in the emerging county-level demand, as counties become the new economic centres.

With our population estimated to grow to over 84 million by 2050, demand for homes and related infrastructure including commercial, logistics and social infrastructure that accompanies them, will only accelerate. The question therefore begs: how can we link this projected housing boom to our industrialisation ambitions?

Consider this: every housing unit provides a huge demand for steel, cement, ceramics, sanitary ware, roofing, timber, paints, wiring, glass and aluminium. Since materials account for roughly 40 to 50 percent of total housing development costs, housing can be a reliable long-term source of industrial consumption.

Today, manufacturing contributes just 7.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a decline from historical levels and below the global mean.

Turning housing into a multi-year industrial output demand signal is how we can change that. The scale is striking. Today the estimated manufactured inputs for a single housing unit, from steel and cement, to tiles and taps, costs about Sh29,500 per square metre.

If Kenya were to ramp up housing production to 200,000 units per year by 2030 and sustain this to 250,000 units thereafter, roughly six million new homes would be built by 2050.

Assuming an average unit of 50 square metres, this translates to 300 million square metres of newly built-up area.

At the estimated manufactured input per square metre, this construction boom would generate approximately Sh9 trillion in demand for manufactured goods, thereby injecting Sh354 billion into our economy every year. This would be transformational for our manufacturing GDP.

Where this money goes is therefore critical. We already have a strong cement production base. Despite a challenging 2024, cement output has rebounded 17.3 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2025 to 4.85 million tonnes.

Yet, for other critical items like ceramic tiles, sanitary ware, fittings and many steel products, our market is flooded with imports. If we don’t act decisively, this housing boom will not build Kenyan industries; it will just bloat our national import bill.

We don’t have to look far for inspiration. Egypt used State-backed housing projects and a new city construction to fuel an industrial surge. It is now becoming a major exporter of cement and other materials.

Similarly, South Africa built an integrated manufacturing cluster for cement, glass, ceramics and aluminium that now serves the entire region, fuelled by its housing agenda. Its cement capacity is about 15 million tonnes a year. These nations prove that a housing agenda, when linked with smart policy can build entire industries.

For Kenya, the economic case is clear. The government must treat housing as both an industrialisation policy as well as a social policy.

This starts by mandating and enforcing local manufactured content thresholds in all housing projects, which can be gradually increased over time.

As a starting point, the current Affordable Housing Programme should sign long-term procurement contracts that give our factories the confidence they need to invest in kilns, rolling mills and other production lines.

This appears to be ongoing to some extent but remains sub-scale. We must create a reliable pipeline of public and private housing projects that gives the local manufacturing industry a reason to build capacity now.

Housing is about giving our people dignity. But it can also be the industrial flywheel that powers our economy for the next 25 years and beyond. This will leave Kenyans not only better housed but with a much larger, more competitive economy. The choice is whether to import that future or make it right here in Kenya.

Mombasa Cement Limited plans to build a 10-megawatt (MW) power plant at its factory in Vipingo, Kilifi County, to help cut energy costs.

The power plant, which will rely on a combination of coal and biomass fuels.

Severally is a word Kenyans love to use-and quite frankly, often abuse. In fact, Kenyans severally use the word severally incorrectly, which drives my nitpicking and pedantic mind absolutely nuts.

And yes, that was a deliberately incorrect use of the word severally, which is defined as: separately, individually, singly, discretely; respectively. The antonym for the word is jointly. But enough of the English grammar lessons for now.

Kenya’s plan to lay a high-speed fibre optic cable from Isiolo to Mandera has entered a critical stage after the completion of an environmental and social impact assessment, setting the stage for the rollout of the project expected to open up the country’s most underserved digital corridor.

The proposed 740-kilometre link, to be implemented by the Information and Communication Technology Authority (ICTA), will run through Isiolo, Garissa, Wajir and Mandera counties, extending the national broadband backbone to the border with Ethiopia and Somalia.

Peter Drucker is quoted to have said, ‘Being at least as good as the leader is a prerequisite to being competitive’. His statement strikes at one of the foundational principles of performance management.

The lowest quality aspect of being competitive is employing benchmarking. It remains a time-tested strategy for organisations and investors when assessing and managing performance.

As organisations implement their sustainability strategy-to-reporting, they must apply this same principle.

While the sustainability journey will differ and requires tailoring to suit the context of each organisation, there are many opportunities for benchmarking that they must leverage to assess the reasonableness of their outcomes and hold themselves accountable.

Benchmarking is also being embraced by sustainability reporting standards, such as the International Sustainability Standards Board, which is responsible for issuing the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards.

Therefore, organisations need to extend the use of benchmarking, a fairly familiar concept, to their sustainability universe.

Some of the areas where benchmarking can provide insights to organisations on their sustainability journey include the following.

The materiality process is a building block for sustainability and sustainability reporting. Organisations should apply benchmarking to this process to enrich their analysis of material sustainability risks and opportunities that affect their industry and competitors.

They can also use it to assess the reasonableness of their materiality process outcomes relative to peers in the market. This process will provide management with valuable insights for continuous improvement. Another important aspect often overlooked when benchmarking is sustainability reporting. The reporting maturity journey for organisations requires the use of benchmarking to not only set ambition but also drive performance.

The benchmarking exercise does not require a report that is better overall, but rather one that incorporates best-in-class practices in specific sections.

Therefore, the goal is to seek out peers who have demonstrated a maturity in specific reporting aspects and use that to enrich and drive improvements in an organisation’s own reporting or process.

Other opportunities for applying benchmarking along the sustainability journey include technology, governance, and risk management. Organisations should encourage the use of benchmarking across their sustainability work streams where relevant.

Benchmarking is a valuable external perspective that organisations can apply when validating and monitoring performance and outcomes.

Tax collections from betting are expected to more than double in the current financial year to June 2026, despite policy shifts through the Finance Act 2025 that slashed the excise duty on wagered amounts and withholding on winnings to five percent.

Parliament Budget Office (PBO) -which advises lawmakers on economic and budget affairs-projects collections of betting taxes to climb to Sh11.4 billion a year, from Sh5.4 billion as the State nets a windfall from changes in the applicable levies on gambling.

The Comesa Competition Commission (CCC) has granted conditional approval for a joint business agreement between British Airways (BA), Qatar Airways and the Spanish carrier Iberia, within the common market, following concerns that it would undermine competitiveness on the busy Nairobi-London route.

The agreement, which was inked in August 2023, allows the airlines to cooperate on scheduling of flights, tickets sales, fare pricing and inventory management, frequent flyer programme coordination, and joint handling and procurement of services.