Category: Business Daily

Tax collections from workers’ earnings have surpassed the National Treasury’s target for the first time since the 2021/22 financial year, ending three consecutive years of underperformance.

Pay-As- You- Earn (PAYE) receipts rose 7.01 percent to Sh599.8 billion in the year ended June 2026, the Treasury says in a fresh report, exceeding the government’s Sh592.1 billion target by Sh7.7 billion.

The performance marks a turnaround after PAYE collections fell short of target by Sh16.2 billion in the 2022/23 financial year, Sh25.8 billion in 2023/24, and Sh6.1 billion in the year ended June 2025.

The latest performance also reflects a shift by the Treasury toward more conservative revenue forecasts after repeated failures to meet ambitious PAYE targets.

For the year ended June, Treasury raised its PAYE target by a relatively modest 4.5 percent, compared with the 7.01 percent growth eventually recorded by collections.

KRA Commissioner-General Adan Mohammed said the improvement was encouraging, although PAYE growth remained below the average 8.5 percent recorded in 2022/23 and 2023/24.

‘While this [growth in PAYE] is an improvement compared to a growth recorded in the financial year 2024/25, it is still lower than average growth of 8.5 percent recorded in the financial 2022/23-2023/24,’ Mr Mohammed said in the latest annual statement on revenue performance, citing data from the 2026 Economic Survey.

‘This performance is affected by the shrinking contribution of formal sector employment to overall employment.’

The share of formal-sector employment fell from 15.7 percent of total employment in 2022 to 15.5 percent in 2024 and 15.3 percent last year.

The decline limits the government’s ability to generate large increases in PAYE because most new jobs are being created outside the formal wage economy.

Formal wage employment nevertheless increased by 101,200 jobs in 2025 to 3.315 million workers, up from 3.214 million a year earlier, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics wrote in the 2026 Economic Survey.

The increase was stronger than the 75,500 formal jobs created in 2024, pointing to some recovery in formal hiring after a period of weaker employment growth.

Formal employment had expanded by 122,900 jobs in 2023 and 109,300 in 2022, before growth slowed to 75,500 new positions in 2024.

Analysis of the official data shows the formal sector has yet to fully recover the jobs lost during the pandemic, when the economy shed 185,800 formal positions in 2020.

The latest PAYE increase, therefore, reflects more than new formal jobs, with higher taxable earnings and improved compliance likely contributing to stronger collections.

The informal economy remains the dominant source of new employment, limiting the expansion of the PAYE tax base.

KNBS data shows the informal sector created 716,800 jobs in 2025, more than seven times the 101,200 posts added through formal wage employment.

The data suggests that most Kenyans entering employment do not automatically join the pool of workers whose salaries are directly taxed through PAYE.

PAYE collections jumped 27.3 percent in 2021/22 to Sh462.4 billion before growth slowed to seven percent in 2022/23 and 12.1 percent in 2023/24.

Growth then almost stalled in 2024/25, increasing by a measly 1.05 percent to Sh560.5 billion before recovering to seven percent in the latest financial year to June.

The latest increase generated an additional Sh39.3 billion in PAYE revenue, giving Treasury a larger contribution from workers as it faces pressure to raise domestic collections.

Treasury raised its PAYE target by 26.1 percent in 2021/22, followed by increases of 12.3 percent and 13.6 percent in the next two financial years.

Those targets proved difficult to achieve, culminating in the Sh25.8 billion shortfall in 2023/24, the largest during the period.

Treasury then cut its PAYE target by 2.4 percent in 2024/25 to Sh566.6 billion, but collections still fell short despite the lower expectation.

For 2025/26, the government increased the target by only 4.5 percent to Sh592.1 billion, well below the seven percent growth eventually achieved.

The turnaround against target represents a Sh33.5 billion improvement from 2023/24, when PAYE collections were Sh25.8 billion below the government’s forecast.

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) expects inflation to peak lower than previously projected, amid anticipation that the US-Israel war against Iran will be resolved soon.

The CBK projects inflation will peak at 6.8 percent in January 2027 before easing in subsequent months, compared with its June projection of 7.2 per cent in February 2027.

‘Overall inflation is expected to remain within the target range in the near term, assuming a de-escalation of the conflict in the Middle East,’ CBK Governor Kamau Thugge said on Wednesday.

Kenya’s inflation edged up to 6.5 percent in July from 6.4 percent in June, driven by higher transport costs.

The CBK expects inflation to remain within its target band of 2.5 to 7.5 percent, assuming a near-term de-escalation of the Middle East conflict, which has pushed up domestic petroleum prices.

The bank has modelled a worst-case scenario in which prolonged conflict pushes crude prices above $110 (Sh14,232) per barrel, sending inflation beyond the upper ceiling. At that price, Thugge said inflation could reach eight percent.

Conversely, inflation would cool faster if crude prices fell to $70 (Sh9,057) per barrel, while the baseline scenario assumes $90 (Sh11,644).

The CBK noted that international oil prices fell sharply after the first ceasefire deal between Iran and the US, suggesting a similar outcome if another agreement is reached.

Higher oil prices have also widened Kenya’s import bill and current account deficit, which reached three per cent of GDP in the 12 months to June 2026, from 1.9 per cent in a similar period last year. The increase was attributed to a wider trade deficit, lower remittances and reduced export receipts.

The deficit is expected to be fully financed by inflows into financial and capital accounts, including foreign direct and portfolio investments, resulting in an overall balance of payments surplus.

The CBK on Tuesday retained its Central Bank Rate at 8.75 per cent for the third consecutive Monetary Policy Committee meeting, saying the current stance remains appropriate to anchor inflation expectations and maintain exchange-rate stability.

KCB Group has increased its interim dividend by 50 percent to Sh3 per share after reporting a 14.2 percent growth in net profit in the half-year ended June.

The regional lender reported a net profit of Sh36 billion, up from Sh31.5 billion posted in a similar period last year.

Last year, KCB paid an interim dividend of Sh2 per share, which was, however, accompanied by an additional Sh2 per share special payout from the gains realised from the sale of National Bank of Kenya (NBK) to Nigeria’s Access Bank.

KCB management said it will comply with its dividend policy of distributing between 35 percent and 50 percent of the bank’s annual profit even in the absence of one-off gains such as the NBK sale.

‘We did about 32 percent payout last year, but that included a special dividend of the distribution of Sh3 from the sale of NBK. Now we are saying we want to get to a minimum 35 percent in 2026 out of pure profits from underlying business, not one-offs,’ said KCB Group CEO, Paul Russo.

The group had been retaining the bulk of its earnings in the last four years as it funded regional expansion, and its Kenyan unit, which is the group’s main contributor, recorded mixed performance.

The Kenyan operations outpaced the profitability of its regional subsidiaries in the half-year to June 2026, with a 16 percent growth in net profit to Sh26.5 billion, up from Sh22.8 billion in the period under review.

Its subsidiaries, which include Rwanda, the DRC, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and South Sudan, saw their contribution to the group’s net profit grow by 10.3 percent to Sh9.52 billion.

The group’s profit growth was attributable to a cheaper cost of funds and lower loan loss provisions following improved quality of its loan book.

Its non-performing loans (NPLs) reduced by 17.3 billion in the 12 months to June to close at Sh203.8 billion, being 15.1 percent of its total loan book down from 18.7 percent.

This is the lowest NPL ratio posted by the lender in more than four years. KCB attributes this to court decisions in its favour after some defaulters sued it for pursuing loans extended to them.

The group grew its deposit base by 15.1 percent to Sh1.71 trillion, but the interest paid out to savers declined by 4.6 percent as the price of deposits declined across the region. Its loan book expanded 13.2 percent to Sh1.24 trillion, leading to a 4.2 percent expansion in interest income.

‘There was a five percent decline in interest expense on customer deposits driven by strategic re-pricing of high-cost deposits and further supported by a reduction in the cost of funds from 3.9 percent in June 2025 to 3.4 percent this year,’ said Mr Russo.

KCB Investment Bank recorded 226.6 percent growth in profit before tax to Sh503.2 million, driven by increased advisory mandates and capital markets transactions. The investment bank’s second half of the year results are expected to be boosted by its role in the government sale of its Sh204.3 billion stake in Safaricom.

Its Corporate Trustee Services posted a 79.8 percent increase to Sh142.5 million, supported by growth in trustee and fiduciary services, while KCB Bancassurance Intermediary delivered Sh335.4 million before tax earnings, which was a 47 percent drop compared to the previous year.

Management attributed the drop in bancassurance business to changes in insurance policy regulations in Kenya, necessitating a change in how commissions are paid.

In 2013, Mr Nyabuto turned to farming, trying his hand at quail, wheat, tomatoes, chicken and capsicum. But the same problem persisted: he was attempting to run a hands-on business remotely from Nairobi, and it just didn’t work.

‘Farming is a hands-on business, and doing it from afar ended up being financially draining,’ he says.

The failures eventually pushed him towards technology, a sector where his training and professional experience gave him a stronger foundation.

He resigned from employment in 2014 to become a full-time entrepreneur, thinking he had done enough planning. He had savings in the bank, rented an office in Nairobi’s Westlands area, furnished it, hired six staff and launched a technology consulting firm called Tally International.

But eight months into 2014, the firm collapsed. ‘I had no real business experience. I made a mistake by resigning and moving directly to entrepreneurship without growing skills like business development and networking.’

Mr Nyabuto had spent about Sh5 million of his savings on the tech firm.

‘The business could not sustain itself. We couldn’t afford the cost of marketing and the engineering perspective of the technologies.’

Additionally, his lack of sales skills compounded the problem.

‘As an entrepreneur, the first salesperson for your business is yourself,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have the right sales and business development skills, which were very important when you are a single entrepreneur.’

Looking back, he says he had though about entrepreneurship to transition from the NGO world, where he had spent years managing donor-funded UNDP and UNEP projects.

‘In an NGO, you are used to spending the money rather than looking for the money,’ Mr Nyabuto says.

Networking was also another blind spot. ‘You might not be able to have the right networks, but you need to learn how to make the right networks.’

His existing network was largely built around the NGO sector, yet Tally was targeting corporate customers.

The failure taught him that entrepreneurs should start from areas they understand. ‘Your opportunities first start from what is known and where you think you have a bit of understanding of the sector.’

So he shut down Tally after burning his savings and returned to formal employment at the end of 2014. But instead of abandoning entrepreneurship altogether, Mr Nyabuto says he decided to treat the failure as business school.

He joined IT and business consulting firm Eurotech Africa as general manager, where he spent about two years learning how to build relationships with corporate clients, negotiate contracts and understand how businesses buy technology.

The experience would prove crucial when he returned to entrepreneurship. Together with co-founder Michael Karume, he launched a technology startup called M-Zawadi in 2015.

The opportunity emerged from an observation about customer loyalty. At the time, loyalty programmes were largely the preserve of large retail chains with sophisticated IT systems.

‘M-Zawadi started with a question of why only supermarkets have reward programmes for their customers?’ says Mr Nyabuto. ‘The mama mboga or kiosk owner didn’t have a mechanism of rewarding buyers or creating incentives for them.’

The founders built an Android-based platform that allowed small businesses to create customer loyalty programmes on a mobile phone.

Customers buying groceries could earn points through SMS notifications, while traders could keep customer records, run promotions and encourage repeat purchases.

But while it was an elegant idea, it proved commercially difficult. ‘The engineering cost was very high,’ he says.

Mr Nyabuto estimates he spent about Sh3 million on the technology infrastructure, including cloud services, software developers and other requirements needed to build the platform.

‘Customer-to-customer businesses also require huge advertising and marketing budgets, which self-funded startups like ours simply cannot afford,’ he says.

A conservative monthly advertising budget for a consumer-facing startup could reach about Sh500,000, an amount the young company could not comfortably sustain.

About two years after launch, M-Zawadi abandoned the consumer market and reinvented itself as an enterprise software business.

Instead of selling loyalty programmes to retailers, the company began building them for manufacturers, banks and insurance companies.

M-Zawadi designed an incentive programme that links distributors, wholesalers and retailers and rewards performance throughout the supply chain.

Insurance companies presented another opportunity. The startup developed what it calls an experiential loyalty programme.

A telematics device installed in a customer’s vehicle monitors driving habits such as acceleration, braking and cornering. Drivers who maintain safe habits accumulate points that can later be redeemed for rewards such as a coffee voucher.

‘The loyalty programme becomes a behaviour change tool,’ Mr Nyabuto says.

Banks adopted similar concepts, rewarding customers for using credit cards more frequently, conducting more transactions or referring new clients.

M-Zawadi continued expanding its product portfolio and in 2020, it introduced eZawadi, initially through partnerships with international gifting companies. The platform converted loyalty points into digital gift vouchers redeemable at more than 70,000 outlets across Europe and the US, including brands such as Starbucks, Amazon and Zara.

M-Zawadi Group Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Naftal Nyabuto poses for a photo during an interview in Nairobi on August 3, 2026.

Dennis Oonsongo | Nation Media Group

Locally, M-Zawadi partnered with Safaricom allowing gift vouchers to be redeemed at more than 700,000 paybill and till number outlets across Kenya.

Recipients can buy groceries, pay school fees, purchase medicine or spend it at virtually any business accepting M-Pesa.

The platform has since evolved further through a partnership with Visa and Absa Bank that allows vouchers to be redeemed anywhere Visa is accepted.

The platform is free for companies to join, with M-Zawadi charging a 3.5 percent transaction fee on the value of vouchers issued.

More than 110 corporates, including Heritage Insurance, Jubilee, Absa Bank, British American Tobacco and Kenafric, now use the platform.

M-Zawadi processes transactions worth between $3 million (Sh388 million) and $4 million (Sh517 million) annually.

While gifting became one growth engine, cloud computing became another. Many Kenyan SMEs are priced out of international cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, so the company built its own locally hosted cloud platform called Cloud9.

Hosted at PAIX’s Nairobi data centre, the service offers IT students cloud hosting for Sh500 a month and MSMEs from Sh1,000 monthly.

‘We’ve been focusing on solutions for MSMEs that simply cannot afford many of these technologies,’ he says.

Two years ago, M-Zawadi launched Shoshin, an innovation arm targeting agriculture, climate and the blue economy sectors. Its first project focused on fish cage farmers in Lake Victoria.

A single cage can cost about Sh1.5 million to establish, yet an entire harvest can be wiped out overnight by deteriorating water quality.

Mr Nyabuto’s team partnered with the Kenya Fisheries Research Institute to deploy floating Internet-of-Things sensors that continuously monitor oxygen levels, pH, chlorophyll levels and water temperature.

Artificial intelligence analyses the readings in real time and automatically sends warning text messages to farmers whenever dangerous conditions emerge.

For independent cage farmers in Kisumu’s Dunga Beach, the system is being commercialised through dashboards costing about Sh3,000 per month.

More recently, the startup studio ventured into the creator economy through UrbanTok, a platform Mr Nyabuto describes as a blend of YouTube and TikTok.

Unlike conventional video-sharing platforms, UrbanTok allows creators to earn directly through premium content, pay-per-view videos, digital gifting, merchandise sales and advertising revenue hosted on their own pages.

Mr Nyabuto says the platform already has about 5,000 creators.

The growing portfolio reflects his philosophy of building a startup studio rather than a single-product technology company.

To date, he has founded 12 startups, seven of which remain operational and profitable under the M-Zawadi fold.

‘There is this perception that you need to specialise. I don’t buy into that concept,’ he says. ‘We are not in markets where one specialised solution automatically becomes a big business. Different industries perform differently at different times, and developing different innovations has been our survival.’

‘For us, it is better risk mitigation. The risk is usually in terms of spreading yourself thin.’

For someone who has tried his hand in over five sectors, how does he identify new opportunities?

‘It’s all based on the market trends,’ Mr Nyabuto says, ‘The more you meet, interact with people, interact with organisations, then you find the problem where it is, and that is what informs exactly what the opportunities are.’

His approach to financing has also been unconventional. Kenya is one of Africa’s top startup funding destinations, attracting $984 million (Sh127.3 billion) from venture capitalists and angel investors last year alone.

Yet Mr Nyabuto deliberately chose not to spend years pitching venture capital investors when starting M-Zawadi. ‘We have never even looked for investors,’ he says, arguing that fundraising can become a distraction.

‘It becomes a full-time job, and you stop focusing on building the company and start focusing on the investment.’ Instead, he kept costs painfully low.

‘There was no fancy office. I worked from home. I didn’t recruit full-time engineers in the beginning. We started with just two staffers, and they were salespeople.’

Winning customers, not investors, became the company’s growth strategy. M-Zawadi turned profitable five years after launching. Its valuation has since risen to about $4.5 million (Sh582 million), from about $500,000 (Sh64.7 million) in 2018.

The company now employs 35 people and has expanded into Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, powering services ranging from MTN Uganda’s loyalty programmes to Tanzania’s standard-gauge railway and Bus Rapid Transit smart cards, as well as value-added services for the Zambian telco Zamtel.

The business growth has also changed Mr Nyabuto’s attitude towards outside capital.

‘Now that our business is profitable, we are in a state where I can negotiate confidently with external investors,’ he says.

The self-funded approach proved particularly valuable during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many firms were forced to scale down operations and lay off staff.

M-Zawadi had grown to about 10 employees by then. It avoided layoffs, instead developing digital products such as online cashback and coupon platforms as companies shifted their marketing online.

For Mr Nyabuto, however, the biggest lesson from 14 years in entrepreneurship has been the value of collaboration.

‘When you are small, you have to collaborate with the big boys in the market,’ he says. ‘You end up looking small if you don’t collaborate more.’

Partnerships, he says, can give a young company access to markets, technology and networks that would otherwise take years and significant amounts of capital to build.

Today, if forced to start again with no money, Mr Nyabuto says he would still choose technology and focus on artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and cybersecurity.

‘The scalability of it is faster,’ he says. ‘You can basically scale to any country without needing a lot of capital investment.’

The conversion is increasingly gaining traction among taxi drivers, but the trend is now catching up with motorists of high-powered vehicles, commonly referred to as fuel guzzlers. Dismas Mogere, a technician at Lake Energies’ conversion centre on Nairobi’s Lang’ata Road, says the trend is largely driven by businessmen who do long road trips.

‘You see right now where we are economical, more people are concerned about keeping money in their pockets, which is forcing them to look at cutting expenses,’ he tells BDLife. ‘There are also those who used to make so much, but now they have some financial hiccups. So, instead of parking the car at home, you opt for conversion,’ he adds.

Oscar Salim is one such user who converted his Land Cruiser in 2023. Converting a Land Cruiser with installation of an 80-litre gas tank costs between Sh200,000 and Sh250,000.

While the one-off installation cost is heavy, Salim says the amount is recovered from savings made from fuel consumption.

LPG costs Sh100 a litre, while petrol currently retails at Sh214. At a time when fuel prices have escalated due to logistical challenges caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by the US-Iran war, the gas prices rose by Sh10 mid last month before retreating to Sh100.

A litre of gas will cover the same distance as a litre of petrol, indicating the cost of a journey is slashed by half when one uses gas instead of petrol.

Salim says he had not encountered any mechanical or performance challenges for the three years he had been using autogas. He has enrolled in motor challenges, showcasing that the mechanical abilities of the car are intact even after the system change.

‘You only lose about five percent power. The good thing with the kits is that it is a computer and it is integrated into the computer system of the car; so it automatically senses if you need more power and switches from gas to petrol,’ says Mr Salim.

He notes that he has helped some of his friends with large cars import and install the conversion kit. The change of petrol cars to autogas use has been a common practice in Europe, with the kits imported from Italy and Poland.

Italy leads Europe in factory-installed LPG vehicle registrations, while Poland relies more heavily on aftermarket conversions of existing petrol cars.

Mr Mogere, who takes pride in being among the first technicians to convert a Toyota TX while training in 2019, says there are increased inquiries from owners of luxury cars.

‘I have gotten so many requests from people with Mercedes-Benz models, especially the E200, and Volvos. We recently did our first Mercedes-Benz; it was very complicated. Following that success, I have placed orders for kits to use on Mercedes-Benz cars and also one to test on a Volvo,’ said Mr Mogere

The cost of converting the Mercedes-Benz was Sh210,000. Converting a car with an engine capacity below 1000 CC is priced at Sh67,000. This is the category for most cars that are used in the taxi business, such as Toyota Passo, Daihatsu Mira and Suzuki Alto.

The price varies depending on the size of gas tank a motorist chooses to install, with this ranging from 20 litres to 92 litres. Those with a higher capacity are charged Sh120,000, while those above 2000 CC are charged between Sh150,000 and Sh200,000.

Large capacity tanks are preferred for their ability to cover long distances, dispelling concerns that one may not be able to get a refuelling station in case they run out while on the road.

Autogas stations have increased to cater for the growing number of users, with Mr Mogere stating that he knows of 39 autogas stations in Nairobi operated by different companies. There are refuelling stations set up in other towns such as Nyeri and Nakuru.

The first company to bring the technology to the country was Proton Gas, commonly referred to as Pro Gas, before the entry of other players in the business.

Pro Gas, being the pioneer, had to create expertise, which saw it set up a training centre in Kabatini near Kenol in Murang’a and recruit 132 automotive-trained mechanics for further training. Mr Mogere disclosed they had converted 92,000 vehicles by the time he left the company. It was easy to monitor the number of vehicles converted when there was only one player in the market, but the rise of conversion centres across the country makes it difficult to track the number of cars converted.

But how safe is autogas conversion? The idea of having highly flammable liquefied petroleum gas powering a car can raise safety concerns.

Mr Mogere is quick to dispel the safety concerns, disclosing there has not been any incident reported since the conversion process was introduced in Kenya in 2019.

Safety measures include the type of tank used and multiple control valves with different purposes to ensure there are no leaks.

The gas is held in a steel tank, which is more puncture-resistant than conventional gas and fuel tanks. Mr Mogere throws it down from the first floor, and it doesn’t get a dent. He discloses the tanks are usually put through several stress-tests to demonstrate they can absorb high impact.

The tank has a float valve, which ensures it fills to 80 percent, leaving room for gaseous expansion as environmental temperatures rise.

The system is also fitted with shut-off valves that automatically cut off the gas in case there is leakage.

If the vehicle is to catch fire, the gas tank is designed to control its pressure via a pressure relief valve, saving the tank from exploding.

Two electronically controlled shut-off solenoids – on an autogas LPG tank and on a reducer under the bonnet – stop the flow of the gas to the engine in case it stops for any reason.

There is also a double back-check valve to ensure there are no leaks during the refilling process.

Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs) gave its nod to the conversion process and use of autogas in vehicles, giving insurance firms confidence to underwrite the vehicles.

Kebs and the National Environmental Management Authority (Nema) have stringent requirements for autogas fuel stations and conversion centres.

The measures include firefighting equipment, gas leak detectors and proper physical outlay to ensure operations are safely laid out. The requirements lock out unqualified entrants in to the industry, ensuring those who are operating have the necessary know-how and observe safety measures.

His interest in coffee started at home. Njiru grew up in a coffee farming family and watched his father, a teacher, use proceeds from coffee to educate his children.

“My dad was just a teacher, but he had coffee farms from which he earned money to put us through school. It was up to us as siblings to figure out that farming has money,” he says.

Coffee also appealed to him because it is a long-term investment, although he knew it would require patience before the returns became significant.

“Coffee is the plant that can be there for like 70 years, and you can harvest from it for a very long time,” says Daniel.

After graduating from Karatina University in 2017, Njiru joined the IT sector where he thrived, his salary doubling every so often. He chose to save a large portion of his income, eventually building the capital that would finance his entry into coffee farming.

“I was pretty minimalistic. 70 per cent of my salary was earmarked for savings,” he says.

After leasing his first half-acre plot in 2022, he leased another half-acre the following year and planted 400 seedlings. In 2024, he moved into rehabilitating abandoned coffee farms, leasing neglected plots at about Sh100 per stem per year.

Njiru’s biggest expansion came in 2025, which he describes as the year he “went all in.” He leased an acre of abandoned coffee for Sh1.6 million and five acres of new land for about Sh2.7 million, adding 3,500 stems in one year using his savings.

This year, he has added another acre for close to Sh2 million, together with three-quarters of an acre and another half-acre of bare land under 15-year leases.

Njiru grows several coffee varieties because each offers different advantages. Ruiru 11 is a dwarf, disease-resistant variety that he says can reduce production costs by about 30 per cent, while SL28 and SL34 are valued for the cup quality sought by exporters but are more vulnerable to disease. K7 offers partial resistance to coffee berry disease.

On one of his farms, about 380 stems produce an average of 12 kilogrammes per stem, giving him roughly 4,560 kilogrammes. He attributes the yield to consistent management and the age of the trees.

“I have met farmers producing as little as five kilos per stem,” he says.

Njiru wants to raise his average yield to 15 kilogrammes per stem as he expands his acreage and improves farm management.

He sells coffee cherry to the factory at between Sh153 and Sh156 per kilogramme. With a target of 15,000 stems producing an average of 10 kilogrammes each, he estimates that a harvest could generate about Sh22 million at Sh153 per kilogramme.

At that scale, he says, investing in local processing and eventually exporting his own coffee would become more practical.

The returns from coffee come after substantial expenditure, something Njiru says prospective farmers need to understand before getting into the business.

He estimates that getting one seedling into the ground costs close to Sh200, excluding labour, fertiliser, digging the planting hole and soil preparation. With thousands of stems, the cost can quickly run into millions of shillings.

During one rehabilitation exercise, he spent Sh1.8 million in a single month. After the trees are established, he budgets close to Sh800 per stem each year for spraying, fertiliser and general maintenance.

Soil preparation and the correct mixing of manure also require specialist input, while irrigation and labour add to the cost of establishing and maintaining the farms.

Some of the investment has also been lost. On one farm, Njiru lost 300 of 700 seedlings because of inadequate watering during a period when money was tight. At another nursery, more than 1,800 seedlings were planted, but only a small fraction survived.

He later began using coffee husks as mulch to retain moisture, which significantly improved survival rates in subsequent plantings.

His farms are in Kirinyaga, which is one of Kenya’s main coffee-producing counties. Data from the Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA) shows that Kirinyaga was the largest source of Kenyan coffee sold directly to overseas markets in the quarter to March 2026.

The county accounted for 52.7 per cent of total direct sale volumes, followed by Kiambu at 16.9 percent and Murang’a at 12.3 percent. Kirinyaga exported 1,678,770.80 kilogrammes directly during the quarter at an average price of Sh52,800 per bag, earning growers Sh1.77 billion.

Although Njiru continues to acquire and lease farmland, he says the biggest constraint is raising enough capital to expand while waiting several years for newly planted coffee to reach full production.

“A farmer paid Sh300,000 from a harvest often cannot convert that into land for four to eight months, given how long negotiations take,” he says. Formal financing is available, he says, but it can be expensive.

His IT career also makes managing the farms more demanding. His work requires him to travel for roughly half the year between Madagascar, Naivasha and Tanzania, but he has continued expanding and managing the farms without employing a farm manager.

“I usually dedicate weekends, especially Sundays, to the farms,” he says.

Njiru’s IT background has influenced the way he manages the farms. He uses soil testing to guide fertiliser application, spray machines for pest control and weeding machines to reduce labour costs.

He also uses Excel spreadsheets to track farm expenses and keep records of what he spends on each plot.

In 2025, Njiru became more active online, using the platform to research coffee farming, share what he was learning and promote his work on social media.

He reads scientific papers on coffee agronomy, tests findings such as fertiliser timing on his own farms and shares the results with other farmers, an approach he describes as becoming “a small journalist.”

“Farmers call me almost every other week to say how my content has changed how they farm,” he says.

The online following has also created a market for his seedlings. He now sells between 5,000 and 10,000 grafted coffee seedlings each month. His target is to reach 15,000 stems within three years, which would take him close to the 100,000 kilogramme production mark he considers the threshold for serious investment in processing and export.

In 2022, a neighbour offered him a bare half-acre for Sh70,000 under a 10-year lease. Njiru paid from his savings, planted 470 coffee seedlings and began building the coffee farm he had wanted to pursue for years.

Four years later, the 31-year-old IT specialist has nearly 10 acres under coffee and close to 7,000 stems spread across leased and rehabilitated farms in Kirinyaga.

Banking platforms, payment networks, telecommunications infrastructure and cloud services have become the invisible fabric that enables commerce, often without users giving a second thought to the complexity that makes these interactions possible.

Yet beneath this apparent simplicity lies an increasingly intricate web of interconnected systems. A single financial transaction may traverse identity services, fraud detection engines, payment switches, settlement platforms, cloud infrastructure, messaging gateways and numerous third-party APIs before it reaches completion.

This growing complexity demands a shift in how we think about operational resilience.

The question is no longer whether critical infrastructure will experience failures. In distributed systems of this scale, outages are not exceptional events but an inevitable consequence of complexity.

The institutions that distinguish themselves are not those that promise perfection, but those that demonstrate the discipline to anticipate failure, contain its impact and maintain public confidence throughout its duration.

Central to that discipline is an often-overlooked principle that deserves to become an industry standard: customers should never be the first to discover that critical infrastructure has failed.

Far too often, organisations learn that an incident has become visible only after customers begin reporting failed transactions, developers notice unexplained API errors, merchants escalate support requests or social media fills with speculation.

By the time an official acknowledgement is issued, the operational narrative has already escaped the organisation’s control. What began as a technical incident rapidly evolves into a crisis of confidence, fuelled less by the outage itself than by the absence of timely, authoritative information.

This should concern every institution operating within the banking, financial services and insurance ecosystem. Trust has always been the industry’s most valuable asset, and in an increasingly digital economy that trust is shaped as much by communication as by technology.

Customers may accept that even the most sophisticated infrastructure occasionally encounters technical difficulties. What they struggle to accept is uncertainty. Silence creates an information vacuum, and information vacuums are invariably filled by rumours, assumptions and conflicting accounts that often inflict greater reputational damage than the original technical fault.

For decades, operational resilience has been discussed primarily through the lens of technology. Organisations have invested heavily in redundancy, disaster recovery, geographically distributed infrastructure, automated failover, observability platforms and increasingly sophisticated monitoring capabilities.

These investments remain essential, but they reflect only one dimension of resilience. The ability to detect failures, isolate affected systems and restore services is unquestionably important; equally important, however, is the ability to communicate clearly, consistently and transparently while those recovery efforts are underway.

Communication should therefore no longer be viewed as a downstream public relations activity that begins once engineers understand the problem. It should be recognised as an operational capability that is designed, tested and continuously improved alongside the infrastructure it serves. In much the same way that institutions engineer for availability, performance and security, they must now engineer for transparency.

This requires organisations to rethink the role of communication during operational incidents. Questions such as who declares an incident, how quickly customers are informed, which channels provide authoritative updates and how enterprise partners receive operational intelligence should never be answered in the middle of an outage.

They should already exist within well-rehearsed operational playbooks. The objective is not simply to communicate more frequently but to communicate with sufficient speed, consistency and technical accuracy that customers, partners and regulators are never forced to speculate about the health of critical services.

Such thinking naturally extends the conversation towards chaos engineering, a discipline that has become increasingly important in the design of modern distributed systems.

Despite its provocative name, chaos engineering is not about deliberately breaking technology for its own sake. It is the disciplined practice of introducing controlled failures into complex systems to understand how they behave under stress.

By simulating degraded databases, network latency, unavailable services or cloud disruptions before they occur in production, engineering teams expose weaknesses that conventional testing rarely reveals. The objective is to replace uncertainty with confidence and assumptions with evidence.

However, the philosophy underpinning chaos engineering should not end with technology. If organisations routinely rehearse database failures, network partitions and infrastructure outages, they should also rehearse communication failures.

Every resilience exercise should ask not only whether systems continue functioning, but whether the organisation itself continues communicating effectively.

How quickly can an incident be acknowledged? Who owns technical accuracy? What happens if the mobile app or USSD channel is unavailable? How are developers, merchants and enterprise partners informed? Can customer support provide reliable guidance before speculation overtakes facts? These questions belong not to corporate affairs alone but to operational resilience itself.

Perhaps it is time for the industry to adopt an additional resilience metric. Alongside Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), organisations should begin measuring what might be termed an Information Recovery Objective-the maximum acceptable interval between the detection of a significant operational incident and the publication of authoritative information to customers, partners and regulators.

From a technical perspective, an outage may last only minutes. From the customer’s perspective, however, the outage lasts until uncertainty ends. Reducing that uncertainty should be regarded as a measurable operational objective rather than an aspirational communications goal.

A practical expression of this philosophy is the adoption of publicly accessible, independently hosted, real-time service status platforms. Such platforms should not be dismissed as customer support tools or marketing assets.

They constitute production infrastructure. Their purpose is to provide a trusted, authoritative view of service health that remains available even when primary systems experience degradation.

Supported by machine-readable APIs, these platforms enable merchants, developers and enterprise customers to automate contingency measures, reroute transactions where appropriate and distinguish between local integration issues and wider ecosystem incidents.

Operational transparency therefore becomes an enabler of resilience across the broader digital economy rather than merely within a single organisation.

This distinction becomes increasingly important as financial services evolve towards instant payments, open finance, embedded banking and programmable money.

The more interconnected digital ecosystems become, the greater the probability that a disruption within one institution will have downstream implications across multiple industries.

Resilience can no longer be considered solely an internal capability. It is rapidly becoming a shared responsibility that depends upon timely information flowing across organisational boundaries with the same reliability as financial transactions themselves.

Boards of directors and executive leadership teams should therefore broaden their understanding of operational resilience. Investment decisions should not focus exclusively on infrastructure modernisation or cybersecurity, important though both remain.

Equal attention must be given to incident management frameworks, executive decision-making during crises, communication governance, customer notification mechanisms and regular simulation exercises that test organisational behaviour under realistic operational conditions. These capabilities are not ancillary to resilient infrastructure; they are integral to it.

Regulators, too, have an opportunity to shape the next generation of resilience standards. As expectations around cyber resilience and operational continuity continue to mature, so too should expectations regarding transparency during service disruptions. Institutions entrusted with moving a nation’s money or enabling its commerce carry responsibilities that extend beyond restoring systems as quickly as possible.

They also have a duty to provide accurate, timely and accessible information to the citizens, businesses and partners who depend upon those systems every day.

Ultimately, resilience is not measured by the absence of failure. In complex distributed environments, failure is unavoidable. What distinguishes mature institutions is their ability to ensure that failure remains controlled, well understood and transparently managed. Customers are remarkably willing to forgive technical faults when they are treated with honesty and respect.

They are far less forgiving when left to diagnose the health of critical infrastructure through repeated failed transactions or rumours circulating online.

The unspoken rule of infrastructure downtime is therefore deceptively simple. Customers should never be the first to discover that a critical service has failed, nor should they have to search for reliable information while an incident unfolds.

Communication is no longer adjacent to infrastructure, nor is it merely a function of corporate affairs. In an economy where trust moves as quickly as data, communication has become an integral part of the infrastructure itself.

The organisations that recognise this reality will not eliminate chaos, but they will manage it with greater transparency, greater confidence and, ultimately, greater public trust.

Kenya Airways ranked among the bottom 10 airlines globally for punctuality in July, the world’s busiest month for air travel.

This is a sharp contrast to its low-cost subsidiary Jambojet, which was among the best 10, potentially adding pressure on the national carrier as it seeks to improve its competitiveness.

KQ ranked 135th out of 143 carriers that made at least 1,500 flights in July, having completed only 58.73 percent of its 2,925 flights on time, with a cancellation rate of 0.41 percent, according to rankings by OAG, a global air travel data provider.

In the same month, Jambojet achieved an on-time performance of 86.54 percent on its 1,795 flights, making it the 10th best performer globally and the second in Africa, after South African budget carrier FlySafair, which completed 89.29 percent of its flights on time.

On-time performance (OTP) is the percentage of flights completed by an airline on time over a given period. In the aviation industry, an airline departure or arrival that happens within 15 minutes of the scheduled time is considered on-time.

KQ attributed its poor performance in the peak period to operational challenges due to limited capacity and ongoing conflict in the Middle East, which has caused many of its flights to reroute.

‘Restrictions and evolving risk assessments around affected airspace have required airlines operating between Africa, Europe and North America to adjust established flight paths, with some services taking longer and more circuitous routings to maintain safe operating margins,’ said Tom Ogendo, head of KQ’s Integrated Operations Control Centre.

‘For Kenya Airways, these changes can have a network-wide effect. Longer sectors increase aircraft utilisation, fuel requirements and crew-duty pressures, while reducing the recovery time available between rotations. On a tightly scheduled network, even a delay on an inbound long-haul service can therefore cascade into subsequent departures from Nairobi.’

The poor performance by KQ also came amid capacity constraints due to prolonged grounding of some of the largest planes on its fleet, resulting from a global shortage in airline parts.

Currently, and for much of July, two of its Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners and two 737-800 planes were grounded for maintenance. This has been going on since last year, with its planes undergoing routine maintenance amidst a global shortage of aircraft parts.

Despite its poor performance, KQ beat its arch-rival on the continent, Ethiopian Airlines, in punctuality. In the same month, ET ranked 140th, with a performance of 52.78 percent and a total of 15,358.

Other African airlines that made the ranking during the period include Tunisia’s Nouvelair, which ranked 90th globally with an OTP of 69.99 percent, and South African Airways, which completed 85.24 percent of its 2,156 flights on time.

Jambojet, which emerged as the fifth most punctual among budget carriers, has recorded rising OTP over the years and has displaced established carriers like KQ, ET, and SAA, among others. Last year, the carrier recorded an OTP of 79.6 percent, performing below SAA’s 81.26 percent.

KQ says it is already implementing measures to improve its punctuality, starting with restoring its grounded fleet to expand capacity.

‘Restoring aircraft affected by engine and maintenance constraints is a key priority, while stronger relationships with manufacturers, maintenance providers and suppliers are intended to improve access to engines, spare parts and technical support,’ said Mr Ogendo.

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has lost its bid to exit a court case in which an M-Pesa user sued Safaricom over mobile money fraud.

The court ruled that the CBK’s role as regulator of payment service providers makes its presence necessary in the legal dispute because it could be asked to enforce any orders against the telecoms operators.

The petitioner, Paula Rogo, wants the court to order Safaricom and M-Pesa Holding Company to strengthen systems for preventing mobile banking fraud and establish dedicated fraud-reporting channels and teams.

She also wants the companies to introduce transparent and timely compensation for fraud victims, investigate perpetrators and keep affected customers informed about investigations, timelines and possible outcomes.

The court found that in the event it grants those reliefs, the CBK will be required to exercise its supervisory powers over the mobile money operators to ensure compliance with the orders.

‘These reliefs fall squarely within the CBK’s supervisory mandate,’ the judge said.

‘CBK is not a party against whom a decree is sought, but its presence enables the court to completely and effectively adjudicate the dispute. I therefore find that CBK has not made out a case to be struck out from these proceedings.’

Ms Rogo moved to court in February 2025, suing Safaricom and M-Pesa Holding Company over an alleged Sh125,658 loss.

She claimed that she received a call from an unfamiliar number from a person who introduced himself as a Safaricom employee.

The caller convinced her he was genuine by sending messages that appeared to come through Safaricom’s official SMS system and citing her M-Pesa balance, recent transactions and frequent contacts.

Believing he was a Safaricom employee, she followed his instructions that ostensibly sought to secure her M-Pesa account.

She lost the money in the process.

Ms Rogo wants the court to declare that the defendants violated her constitutional rights to information, consumer protection and fair administrative action.

Within 180 days, she wants them to establish systems to prevent or reduce M-Pesa fraud, dedicated reporting lines and teams, and fair and timely compensation.

She also wants victims updated on investigation progress and outcomes, and seeks Sh125,658, general and punitive damages and interest.

The CBK asked the court to remove it, arguing that it was not a proper party.

Ms Rogo opposed the application, saying the CBK should guide and support the court because it regulates payment service providers.

‘If judgment is entered in the plaintiff’s favour, the CBK would be required to exercise its supervisory powers to ensure the defendants comply with the court’s orders,’ the judge said, finding that the regulator had not shown prejudice from remaining in the case.

‘Without the CBK, enforcement may be difficult.’

Safaricom and M-Pesa Holding separately challenged the suit, arguing that Ms Rogo should first have used the dispute resolution process under the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA).

They said the dispute fell under the Kenya Information and Communications Act and its regulations, which empower the CA to resolve disputes.

The court rejected that argument, finding that the relevant regulation says a party ‘may’ notify the CA of a dispute within 60 days.

‘Regulation 4(1) uses “may” for the initiation of the dispute process, which makes this process optional,’ the court said, adding that the High Court retained jurisdiction.

The judge found that the case was not ‘merely a consumer complaint.’

The case is scheduled for mention on September 17.

Agriculture is the foundation of millions of Kenyan livelihoods, national food security and rural prosperity. Yet it is also the sector most exposed to climate risk.

Every planting season is increasingly a gamble against drought, floods, pests, diseases and unpredictable weather.

This year, erratic rainfall has devastated harvests. In Nakuru, one maize farmer harvested 120 bags from five acres last season but only 26 bags this year using similar practices on the same land.

In Taita Taveta, crop failure has left tens of thousands facing food insecurity, while in West Pokot, thousands of households require food assistance.

For farming families, crop failure means depleted savings, inability to repay loans, children withdrawn from school and increased dependence on humanitarian assistance. This is why agricultural insurance must become a central pillar of Kenya’s agricultural transformation agenda.

Last year, Kenyans spent Sh2 billion insuring crops and animals, according to the Insurance Regulatory Authority. Although this nearly doubled the previous year’s figure, fewer than one per cent of farmers reportedly insure their crops.

Agricultural insurance is more than compensation after disasters. It gives farmers confidence to invest in improved seed, fertiliser, irrigation and mechanisation, knowing catastrophic weather will not wipe out their investment. It also strengthens the wider agricultural value chain by improving farmers’ access to credit and reducing the burden of emergency relief.

Technology can help expand coverage. Satellite imagery, remote sensing, automated weather stations, artificial intelligence and digital claims assessment can improve accuracy and speed up payouts.

Parametric insurance can trigger automatic payments when rainfall, temperature or vegetation indicators reach agreed thresholds. Kenya’s mobile phone and mobile money infrastructure provides a strong foundation for digital distribution.

Scaling agricultural insurance requires coordinated action by government, counties, insurers, banks, saccos, agribusinesses and development partners. Farmers must also see insurance not as an optional expense but as an investment in resilience.