Category: Business Daily

Shares at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) rewarded investors with the highest returns in the third quarter of the year, eclipsing bonds and cash deposits whose gains dropped in the wake of falling interest rates.

During the three months to September, investor wealth at the bourse, as measured by market capitalisation, rose by 15.1 percent, or Sh367.4 billion, to reach Sh2.78 trillion.

The Employment and Labour Relations Court has faulted Consolidated Bank of Kenya for the unfair dismissal of one of its business development officers over allegations of improper loan approvals totalling Sh102 million.

Justice Monica Mbaru stated that it was improper for the bank to hold Emmanuel Wambua responsible for a non-verified asset used to secure the debt, noting further inconsistencies in the lender’s actions.

Early last month, Karen Thaba, a digital marketer, was approached by an agency to apply for a social media role and content creator. After she shared, the agency wrote back asking for a full social media strategy plus a two-week content creator calendar in 36 hours for a specific brand as an assignment.

“I checked the brand they requested I make the content for and noticed they could be their client,” she recalls.

A judge has reprimanded Kenya Power for repeatedly violating a former employee’s rights by subjecting her to repeated temporary three-month job contracts for eight years.

Employment and Labour Relations Court Judge James Rika said offering short-term contracts to employees for prolonged periods is casualisation of labour, which deprives workers of job security and terminal benefits due to permanent and pensionable employees.

Family Bank of Kenya has called an extraordinary general meeting of its shareholders to seek their approval to list on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE).

The medium sized bank, which has flirted with public listing for over a decade, will be listing by way of introduction, meaning it does not plan to sell new shares but will be giving shareholders a trading platform to make their stocks more liquid.

In rural Kenya, the daily ritual of cooking is a battle against time and soot – mothers gathering firewood, smoke from cooking fire filling homes, clothes and lungs coated in layers of ash, painting the walls black.

It is the life of 90 percent of households; millions of people, in what is a quiet struggle for a clean flame. So, how can they move away from the choking, billowing smoke to clean fuels?

Policymakers are grappling with how to re-engineer county governments to drive the clean energy agenda and unlock the potential of renewable sources like solar and geothermal, not just for power grids, but for homes and small businesses.

This is a subtle acknowledgment that national-level solution is not enough; there’s need to empower counties to close the gap from the ground up.

The journey toward a cleaner energy future is already underway, but there are challenges that counties, investors, and other players face.

A year ago, the government began implementing the LPG Growth Strategy, an initiative to transition 80 percent of the population from biomass to clean LPG by 2026.

The strategy aims to boost the per capita LPG consumption from 6.5 kg to 15 kg by 2030 by upgrading the infrastructure, introducing LPG for schools, availing subsidised cylinders, and enacting legal and regulatory reforms.

While LPG uptake within urban centres has made tremendous gains, rural areas still lag due to reported county regulatory barriers.

Investors say county levies are exorbitant and often come in multiple forms-from branding, parking, and licence fees to business permits. They cite hostility from county and law enforcement officials.

Counties need to generate revenue, but they also need to keep energy prices affordable to promote adoption.

The Energy Regulatory Authority is urging counties to adopt incentives like Time-of-Use tariffs to reduce operational costs and drive industrial growth, and partner with the private sector on captive energy generation and storage.

According to Dr Stephen Ikiki, Senior Economist, National Treasury, inter-county collaborations could help unlock innovative financing models, such as blended finance or green bonds. This approach would allow counties to attract and negotiate large-scale sustainable energy investments, weaving them directly into their budgets.

Counties have a different story. For instance, in Kilifi County, Mr Wilfred Baya, the Director of Energy, shared how the county is empowering communities to lead the charge.

They have adopted a community-driven model where former charcoal sellers are now the biggest LPG investors and ambassadors. The county is also allocating land for LPG refill infrastructure and considering new policy incentives to stimulate investment. These efforts are making energy a central part of the County Integrated Development Plan.

The Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra) is supporting the transition through regulation that bolsters business operations for solutions like Autogas, smart LPG meters, and reticulation, says Stella Opakas, Deputy Director Mid and Downstream Petroleum.

The Energy (Integrated National Energy Plan) Regulations, 2025, have been gazetted to enhance energy access and reliability in counties through the integrated national energy planning committee that draws representation from the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, Council of Governors, Epra and sector agencies.

One of its primary tasks is to track implementation of the county energy plans and the integrated national energy plan. The challenge now is finding the right balance.

A recent post on a popular Facebook group for mothers of teenagers sparked debate after one parent shared her shock when her son announced he had a girlfriend.

The post drew hundreds of comments, with many mothers admitting that teenage romance is a common yet unsettling milestone in parenting. Most confessed they were unsure how to handle it, often choosing to step back and wait for the ‘love bug’ to fade as their children grew older.

Regulated Saccos recruited over 637,696 new members last year as deposits crossed the Sh700 billion mark, pointing to the sustained interest of Kenyans in co-operatives.

Latest industry data shows the 177 deposit-taking (DT) Saccos and 178 non-withdrawable deposit-taking (NWDT) Saccos under Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority (Sasra) supervision, saw their membership rise by 26.3 percent from 504,915 in 2023.

Kamau founded and now runs a fast-growing agritech firm out in the leafy Nairobi suburb of Karen. When customer numbers surged last quarter, he divided up his staff and placed them into new departments.

He then pushed some decisions down the chain granting greater autonomy all while quietly hoping that things would work out with the new arrangement to handle the excess workloads.

Instead, the departments just did not get their information straight. The sales team kept promising tech features that the software engineers had never actually built into the system.

The operations department spent a lot of time responding to inquiries from the sales team that never materialised into actual customer acquisition.

As a result, Kamau’s senior team started meeting more often but kept spinning their proverbial wheels without actually solving much. Even though everyone was working hard the organisation just felt out of sync within itself.

There is a helpful research-based way to make sense of the above kind of institutional mess that Kamau faces. Social scientists John Joseph and Metin Sengul reviewed two decades of research on how companies set up their internal structures, standard operating processes, and technology systems and just recently published a highly prestigious study on what happens to organisations based on how they organise themselves in prior years.

The metanalysis finds that organisational design is not a one-time organisation chart that hangs on a wall and is only revisited and revised every few years. Instead it proves to be a living dynamic set of choices that must fit together inside a firm and also fit external stakeholders keeping in mind that external relationships shift over time.

When the needs of external stakeholders change and do not match the internal structure, then organisational performance drops. When leaders notice the misfit and actively realign and therefore correct the mismatch, then performance results recover and thrive.

The study breaks down four everyday lenses. First, configuration asks leaders whether the pieces inside the firm reinforce each other and match the broader external environment.

Sadly, leaders often only notice this when something does not match correctly. As an example, a growth push can weaken training, which then can weaken quality, which then can weaken the firm’s reputation. The correction cannot be found in one cookie cutter solution.

It is usually a series of small design moves that brings internal and external alignment back into sync. Sometimes it even means separating a work team to explore new creative ideas while another team tries to exploit and strengthen what already work well within the firm. Sometimes it also can mean cycling between decentralising to find options while also centralising to unify them together.

Second, the concept of control asks a leader how they guide people to act in the company’s best interests rather than merely their own.

Key performance targets, regular reviews, and organisational culture all do matter. But a narrow span of control with fewer direct reports reporting up to each manager does help managers to coach each of their direct reporting staff better.

Wider spans tend to work only when information is easy to access and flows cleanly throughout the organisation.

In such scenarios, many human resources teams focus on bonus incentives to bring about alignment. But high-powered bonuses can push effort toward short-term wins but can quietly choke and kill off long-term exploration if human resources is not careful.

If department work is truly interdependent and it is hard to see who did what and give credit to where credit is due, then simple financial extrinsic rewards will cause underperformance unless leaders adjust the task and the metrics both together.

Third, channelisation makes leaders asks where their and their department’s attention goes. Organisational structure shapes what people notice. Headquarters tends to watch the whole portfolio.

Departmental teams tend to watch their local specific wins and losses. Managers need simple communication routines that connect the diverging views so that attention converges on what truly matters.

Framing scenarios from the top down can prime staff members’ focus, but teams on the ground in departments can also pull attention upward when they feel safe and empowered to share their voices upwards all while bringing clear evidence.

Fourth, coordination forces leaders to ask how groups with interdependent tasks can move as one. If Kamau cannot act until Mutisya acts, who himself cannot act until Achieng acts, etc, it becomes difficult to proceed forward in unison.

So, when parts of the business depend on each other, leaders will need shared departmental language, step in to provide clear project interfaces, and keep some decisions that stay centralised so the whole broader team stays coherent.

This goes against conventional leadership wisdom. In other cases, managers can break work into modules. In so doing, they can let units experiment simultaneously but in parallel while keeping shock unexpected results from experiment from spilling over and harming another part of a team.

This type of modularity is complicated to implement but can be useful if and only if it can match the real interdependence within the team.

In closing, good design is not a big grand theory. Instead, it is practical attention to honest task versus structure fit.

The government projects Sh2.7billion savings in reforestation costs as it moves to open up public forests to private investors as part of a strategy to maximise returns from the fast-growing industry through concession deals.

Concession agreements give an individual or organisation the right to use a specific area in a national or county forest by means of a long-term contract for commercial forest management and use.