Category: Business Daily

Recently, the announcement of the “Women in Film Entrepreneurship Hub” residency by KFC (Kenya Film Commission) and GIZ (The Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Internationale Zusammenarbeit ), stirred a debate in my head.

On one hand, the residency is a great, much-needed opportunity that promises vital funding and mentorship to dynamic female filmmakers, a goal we can widely applaud and one that I fully support.

On the other hand, the programme’s sole criterion, exclusively based on gender, raises serious questions about creative segregation, meritocracy, and the core mandate of national institutions in an already struggling creative sector.

The fundamental flaw is that it puts identity over competence and skill. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a young, passionate filmmaker.

He puts his head down, aggressively pursues the necessary education, and networks tirelessly to the point of offering his services for free to hone his craft. He has the drive, the skills, and great ideas, and is prepared to join an industry he knows is unstable.

Now imagine that person systematically locked out of critical lifeline opportunities, not because his portfolio is weak, but purely because of his gender.

In a discipline as creatively intensive as filmmaking, where the final work is ultimately judged on talent and vision, prioritising an external, immutable factor like gender over skill is negative. It sends a message that a national commission is willing to overlook potential and ignore those whose work could genuinely elevate the industry simply because they happen to be men.

This leads directly to the core institutional contradiction. KFC is explicitly mandated to be an inclusive public entity, meant to serve and support and stabilise the entirety of the national film industry, not just one demographic.

By approving and championing a programme that deliberately segregates opportunity based on gender, the KFC seems to embrace a form of identity politics that undermines its universal charter.

To highlight the injustice, imagine the outrage if this residency were exclusively for men. The silence regarding the exclusion of male filmmakers, rationalised by the perceived nobility of the cause, exposes a profound double standard regarding equal access to resources.

While the intent to uplift female voices is noble, the mechanism chosen is shortsighted. Sustainable growth for the African creative space will not come from deliberate segregation.

The better, more equitable approach would be for KFC to use its energy and resources to invest in system stabilisation, universal funding of essential infrastructure, creating lucrative distribution channels, and ensuring stability and transparency within the industry.

It is in strengthening this overall economic foundation of filmmaking that the industry will organically attract and retain talent from all demographics and make the mechanics of selling filmmaking as a viable career path from the grassroots up, irrespective of gender, that much easier.

The emphasis needs to shift from creating niche, gender-specific pipelines to fostering universal support and demonstrable excellence for all.

The High Court has handed businessman Peter Munga a reprieve after stopping a bank from auctioning his 75 million shares in Britam Insurance.

The injunction came after his wife, Rose Njambi, objected to the planned sale, arguing that the shares constitute matrimonial property and cannot be disposed of without her consent.

In a decision that offers immediate relief to the billionaire co-founder of Equity Bank, the Commercial Division Court froze the sale of the shares – valued at approximately Sh649 million – pending the determination of a suit where Ms Njambi claims half the stock as jointly acquired marital property.

The court found that Ms Njambi proved an arguable case that her husband unlawfully pledged matrimonial property to secure the contested loans without her knowledge or consent.

The ruling halts African Banking Corporation (ABC Bank)’s planned auction of the shares, which were pledged as collateral for loans advanced to Mr Munga.

The suit has drawn a sharp reaction from ABC Bank’s lawyers, who have accused Mr Munga of using the courts to frustrate a lawful recovery process.

The freeze order, which highlights a spouse’s veto power over loans secured with joint assets, will remain in force pending determination on whether the shares are matrimonial property.

The bank had in September 2024 declared the businessman in default of Sh274 million and $1.23 million (Sh159 million) loans, totalling Sh433 million, in unpaid debt.

In the suit, Mr Munga’s wife claims that ABC Bank took part of the shares as collateral without her approval and when he defaulted repayment, it issued a demand notice dated September 24, 2024 seeking payment of Sh433 million, failing which the pledged shares would be sold.

Ms Njambi also filed an application challenging the planned auction, contending that the bank had proceeded with full knowledge of her beneficial interest in ownership.

She informed the court that Mr Munga was her husband, and that during the subsistence of their marriage, they jointly acquired 75 million shares in Britam Insurance Company Limited.

Read: Tycoon Munga fails to block auction of his Britam shares

Of these, 25 million shares were registered in her name, while 50 million were registered in Mr Munga’s name. She contended that both constituted matrimonial property within the meaning of Section 6(1)(a) of the Matrimonial Property Act.

She told the court that though only 50 million shares had been used by Mr Munga to secure the credit facility, the bank was threatening to auction the entire 75 million shares, a move that would deprive her of the only substantial matrimonial asset.

“Without this injunction, I will lose our family’s only substantial asset,” Ms Njambi argued in court filings. She offered Sh100 million as security, a condition the court accepted.

ABC Bank had opposed the application, dismissing the case as a “sham” and alleging Ms Njambi was a proxy helping her husband delay repayment.

The bank’s legal manager argued that the application was made in bad faith and that it formed part of a series of vexatious and frivolous suits instituted to frustrate the lender’s legitimate recovery efforts against the businessman.

The bank argued that no marriage certificate was provided to prove the marriage, and that the 50 million shares were solely registered in Mr Munga’s name; hence no evidence of joint ownership or spousal consent existed.

However, the court ruled that the injunction was appropriate in the circumstances and that the bank’s interests were sufficiently protected by Ms Njambi’s Sh100 million security deposit, ordered to be held in a joint advocate account.

The court found that the loss of the shares before the hearing of the suit would occasion irreparable prejudice to Ms Njambi.

“Shares in a listed company may fluctuate in value and, once sold to third parties, cannot easily be recovered. Monetary compensation may not fully vindicate the applicant’s constitutional right to equality in marriage and to property jointly acquired,” the court observed in the ruling with far-reaching implications for matrimonial property rights in Kenya.

The ruling reaffirmed Section 12 of the Matrimonial Property Act, which bars spouses from disposing of joint assets without mutual consent.

The court found that this spousal veto power, which saved Mr Munga’s fortune, could not be wished away.

Section 6(1)(a) of the Matrimonial Property Act defines matrimonial property to include ‘the matrimonial home and household goods and effects in the matrimonial home or any other immovable and movable property jointly owned and acquired during the marriage.’

The ruling stalls ABC Bank’s recovery efforts, giving Mr Munga breathing space to renegotiate his debt. The tycoon had filed three failed suits to stop the sale before his wife’s intervention.

The freeze holds until the main suit determines whether the 50 million shares are matrimonial property and if ABC Bank violated spousal consent laws.

Sanlam General Insurance Limited has completed the transfer of its general insurance business to Jubilee Allianz General Insurance Kenya Limited, marking the final step in a restructuring plan designed to consolidate operations of the two insurers under a single brand.

The transfer, approved by the Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA), was completed on November 1, 2025, following the fulfilment of all corporate and regulatory conditions.

In a joint statement, the two companies said the transfer covers all general insurance policies previously issued by Sanlam General Insurance, which have now been assumed by Jubilee Allianz.

The merged entity will continue to manage and honour all existing policy obligations, claims and customer relationships.

‘All policyholders who previously held policies with Sanlam General Insurance Limited and all other persons whose personal data was held with Sanlam General Insurance Limited are hereby notified that their personal data has been transferred to Jubilee Allianz General Insurance Kenya Limited in order for the transferee to be able to continue performing the underlying contracts and conducting the business,’ reads the joint notice.

The transfer is part of a wider integration strategy following the 2021 partnership between Sanlam Group and Allianz SE, which has one of Africa’s largest non-bank financial services groups.

The development leaves Jubilee Allianz as the successor firm in the general insurance segment while Sanlam continues to operate in other financial services lines in Kenya, including the life insurance subsidiary.

Jubilee Allianz Kenya is pursuing a name change to Sanlam Allianz General. Sanlam Kenya, which had Sanlam General as one of its subsidiaries, will become Sanlam Allianz Holdings.

Allianz SE and Sanlam Limited in 2023 said their joint venture, called Sanlam Allianz, will have a combined group equity value of about R35 billion (Sh254.2 billion), giving customers a broader offering of insurance products tailored to their needs.

The two firms are aiming at becoming among the top three players in both market share and profitability, in the markets where the venture will operate.

Allianz SE early in the year increased its indirect stake in Sanlam Kenya to 28 percent from 23.09 percent after paying R4.5 billion (Sh31.3 billion) to acquire an additional stake in Sanlam Allianz.

African countries must heed to experts’ recent call for stronger collaboration between scientists, policymakers and communities to bridge the gap between research and implementation.

Lamentably, there is limited impact of African research on public health and community wellbeing. That is why the call made by researchers, policymakers and journalists at the recently held, first national science research translation congress, must be taken seriously.

According to African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), about 80 to 83 percent of research resources are wasted because they are not being translated into action.

Even as universities and institutions generate ground breaking research, a significant portion remains underutilised. They do not inform policy, not guiding programmes and do not improve lives as it should.

Research and innovation are indispensable for achieving universal health coverage and national development priorities.

That is why more should be done to produce, translate and apply research. Even more important is the need to measure research impact on people’s health and wellbeing.

From disease surveillance to vaccine introduction, to digital health and health financing models, research provides the evidence required to make informed decisions.

Technology should be used to bring interventions closer to the people. Scientists should use digital tools and artificial intelligence to speed up research translation and regulatory approvals.

As some experts have noted, sheer volume of scientific data regulators must review is major cause for delays in approving life-saving drugs such as heat stable carbetocin-medication used to prevent postpartum haemorrhage-which took years to be approved and registered.

Artificial intelligence can help scan through thousands of pages in minutes. It is important to leverage AI to strengthen healthcare systems. AI tools can improve supply chains, clinical decision-making, disease surveillance, and health information systems.

At the same time, more should be done to build capacity of policymakers on health research utilization. One of the key challenges to research utilisation in health policy is limited capacity of policy makers to demand and to uptake research.

Also, media must be a key ally in transforming research into public good. Scientists are not always the best communicators, but through the media, they can influence healthier behaviors. Collaboration with journalists is vital to ensure scientific information reaches communities in clear and relatable language.

Researchers, policymakers and journalists must work together to make science palatable to the ordinary person.

Equally important, Scientists should leverage digital media platforms such as Instagram, facebook, linkedin, X, YouTube and TikTok to make research more visible and understandable.

Digital branding and strategic communication should not be viewed as publicity but as an essential part of science communication that shapes how policymakers and the public use research evidence.

Scientists should stop speaking among themselves, and engage more with the people who need the solutions.

Partnerships that aim at solving real problems are essential. Scientists, government officials and media professionals must work hand in hand to ensure ground breaking discoveries made in laboratories translate into real-world benefits for communities.

It is not enough for research to exist in silos. It must be accessible, understood and implemented in ways that directly impact public health and wellbeing.

KCB Group, one of Kenya’s largest banks, is acquiring a minority stake in digital payments provider Pesapal, strengthening its position in the fintech industry.

The bank has announced its intentions to acquire an undisclosed minority stake in the Kenyan fintech, subject to regulatory approvals, including the Competition Authority of Kenya, and the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK).

This marks its second acquisition of a fintech this year, after acquiring Riverbank Solutions Limited, a fintech firm associated with Nick Mwendwa, former president of the Football Kenya Federation, earlier this year.

‘The investment sets the stage for development of innovative payment and other related solutions for Kenya’s small and micro enterprises enhancing value for shareholders of both Pesapal and KCB,’ the lender said in a notice signed by company secretary Bonnie Okumu.

Founded in 2009 by entrepreneur Agosta Liko, Pesapal processes payments for thousands of businesses across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, operating under a payment service provider licence from the CBK.

The platform enables merchants to accept both card and mobile money payments-online and in-store-with integrations for Visa, Mastercard, American Express and M-Pesa.

Often described as a backbone of e-commerce and service payments in East Africa, Pesapal supports a wide range of industries including hospitality, education and transport.

KCB, which already runs one of Kenya’s largest agent and merchant networks, expects that its partnership with Pesapal will cement its foothold in the merchant acquiring and SME payments sector.

The move aligns with KCB’s broader shift towards fintech-driven growth, following strong 2024 results. The bank’s profit after tax rose 64.9 percent to Sh61.8 billion, buoyed by solid revenue growth across all segments.

Non-interest income increased by 16.5 percent Sh67.5 billion, driven largely by gains in foreign exchange trading.

The government has set up two steering committees to spearhead a two-year drive to revive coffee farming, in the latest official effort to arrest declining production and reverse years of shrinking acreage in traditional highland zones.

According to a latest gazette notice by Cooperatives Cabinet Secretary Wycliffe Oparanya, the committees, a national and a county one, will design strategies to expand the crop beyond the core coffee belt, and specifically introduce the crop in emerging and non-traditional regions.

This, the notice indicates, will be effected through the cooperative movement as the State seeks to broaden production capacity and rebuild volumes lost to land conversions and crop shifts.

‘The County Steering Committee shall have similar functions to the National Steering Committee at the county level and shall report on progress and outcomes to the National Steering Committee,’ said Mr Oparanya in the gazette notice.

Most of Kenya’s long-established coffee areas have been shrinking as farmers in counties like Murang’a, Kiambu and Nyeri convert land to avocado, macadamia and real estate due to poor returns over the years, with Kiambu losing chunks of farmland to residential blocks and gated developments.

The push into new zones comes at a time when counties like Laikipia, Taita Taveta, Elgeyo Marakwet, Siaya and Baringo have recently recorded rapid expansion in acreage under coffee, pointing to visible early tests of diversification that the State now intends to formalise and scale more deliberately.

The committees will also coordinate various public agencies and key sector institutions to anchor the revival strategy within cooperatives, which remain the core mobilisation vehicle for smallholder farmers who produce the bulk of Kenya’s coffee output.

The State is banking on cooperatives to provide the aggregation scale required to make coffee viable in new regions where the crop has never been traditionally grown and where individual farmers would otherwise lack commercial leverage and market discipline.

The move adds to the ongoing reform track where the government has since February 2023 restructured regulation, including bringing the Nairobi Coffee Exchange under the Capital Markets Authority, and licensed brokers in place of marketing agents.

Recent official trade data showed an improvement in export performance and a lift in both volume and value of unroasted coffee shipped out of Kenya in the first half of this year, with exports nearly doubling to Sh35.4 billion, signalling renewed farmer attention and improved incentives.

Corruption is often described as a cancer that eats away at the very fabric of society.

From inflated procurement contracts to money laundering and the misuse of public resources, white-collar crime continues to undermine development, weaken trust in institutions, and deepen inequality.

As technology reshapes every aspect of our lives, one innovation-blockchain-is emerging as a potential weapon in this long-standing fight.

At its simplest, blockchain is a digital ledger technology that records transactions in a secure, immutable, and transparent manner. Once information is entered, it cannot be altered without leaving a trace.

This unique feature can make blockchain technology particularly attractive to governments, law enforcement and regulatory agencies that want to tighten controls against fraud, bribery and illicit financial flows.

For instance, public procurement systems powered by blockchain could make every contract, bid and payment visible to the public and auditors alike. Land registries, another common source of corruption, could be digitised on blockchain platforms, preventing manipulation of ownership records or multiple claims on the same property.

Such applications would close loopholes that corrupt actors exploit and strengthen public confidence in government institutions.

But blockchain’s potential does not guarantee success. Its effectiveness depends heavily on transcending factors-such as digital infrastructure, robust legal frameworks and political commitment-that lie beyond the technology itself.

As highlighted in U4 Issue 2020:7, technology alone cannot root out corruption; it must be embedded in a system that values transparency, accountability and strong oversight.

Unlike traditional systems that place trust in individuals or institutions, blockchain shifts the balance of trust to data and code. In practice, this means that citizens no longer have to rely solely on officials to safeguard records; instead, they can trust the transparency and immutability of the blockchain itself.

This paradigm shift could be revolutionary in societies where institutional trust has been eroded due to corruption and political interference.

The transition is not without challenges. Implementing blockchain in governance touches fundamental societal values: identity, privacy, transparency and accountability. Striking the right balance is critical.

One of blockchain’s most powerful features is its transparency. Every transaction is traceable, every record verifiable. Yet this strength can also become a weakness when it collides with individual rights, such as the right to privacy.

Blockchain, by design, makes deletion impossible.

This tension raises important legal and ethical questions: How do we balance the need to protect privacy with the need to harness transparency in the fight against corruption? Policymakers must confront these dilemmas head-on, crafting frameworks that maximise accountability without eroding fundamental freedoms.

Another critical concern arises when blockchain is used to manage registries of physical assets, such as land or vehicles. While the digital record may be incorruptible, it is only as accurate as the information entered at the outset.

Trusted gatekeepers are therefore essential to ensure that the physical reality matches the digital record. Otherwise, corruption could shift from digital manipulation to fraudulent inputs, thus undermining the entire system.

Several African countries are already ahead of the curve.

Nigeria has established clear regulations for cryptocurrency exchanges, South Africa has moved forward with comprehensive guidelines for digital assets and Mauritius has positioned itself as a blockchain-friendly hub with dedicated regulatory sandboxes.

Kenya, on the other hand, is still in the process of finalising its regulatory framework, currently at the Third Reading stage in Parliament.

This makes commendable progress; however, timely implementation would be important to ensure that gaps are not left open for potential misuse in the rapidly evolving digital finance landscape.

For many developing countries, adopting blockchain faces significant hurdles. Digital infrastructure remains weak, with limited internet access in some areas. Digital literacy is uneven, meaning that even if systems are built, citizens and officials may struggle to use them effectively.

These challenges underscore the need for a comprehensive approach: building infrastructure, enhancing capacity-especially for law enforcement officers to be able to trace and recover stolen assets-and modernizing laws alongside technological adoption.

A nuanced understanding of the technology is crucial before deciding whether-and how-to integrate it into governance systems.

Yet hesitation also carries risks. With global adoption accelerating, countries that delay may find themselves struggling to catch up in a world where corruption has already migrated to new digital platforms.

The balance for policymakers is delicate: act too slowly, and the window of opportunity closes; act without foresight, and unintended consequences could erode rights or waste resources. Its success will depend not on the technology alone, but on the legal, political and social ecosystems into which it is introduced.

Blockchain is not a magic cure for corruption, but it offers unprecedented opportunities to enhance transparency, strengthen accountability, and rebuild trust in public institutions. For policymakers and regulatory experts, the choice is clear.

The future of governance will increasingly be digital. Investing today in the right frameworks, infrastructure, and skills could position nations to harness blockchain not only to fight cryptocurrency-enabled crime and white-collar fraud, but also to redefine the integrity of public service for generations to come.

If corruption is the disease, blockchain could be part of the cure-provided leaders have the courage and foresight to use it wisely. Writer is an enthusiast blockchain and crypto investigator.

I walked away from my favourite burger joint over two paid squirts of ketchup. In most eateries, whether standing in a chips-and-chicken shop in the middle of the night, or seated at a fancy restaurant, tomato sauce comes with fries, by the bottle! Their small savings turned a loyal customer into an ex-customer. It is a trivial example, but businesses often make penny-wise choices that erode their treasured customers’ experience, loyalty and quietly drain revenue.

Even though the statistics on the impact of Customer Experience (CX) on competitiveness are eye-catching, it is hard for most leaders to articulate what needs to be done to make their companies more customer-centric. Companies that are leaders in CX achieve growth rates 3.4 times those of CX laggards, and leaders in CX can charge more than 16 percent more than their competitors. This is news that should make every leader sit up. Here is a simple four-step framework that teams can use to evaluate whether they are being customer-centric.

The HELO framework is an approach based on service design and design thinking. These methods give tools and guidance on deeply understanding your customer using empathy and isolating the challenges that the customer has to align the solution offering to solve the real problem.

The first step, H, for Human, is to assess whether your company is using qualitative tools to uncover its customers’ needs, challenges and aspirations.

Having your executives walking the floors and meeting customers is an absolute first step, but an intentional user research exercise will uncover the “why” behind customer preferences and choices. What you end up with is personas that explain motivation, context, and emotions. Having a practice of preparing well-defined personas is an essential part of a customer-centric organisation.

Now that personas are defined, map the Experience (the ‘E’) to find the key moments to enhance. It is important to distinguish between the user journey or the customer steps in a digital application, and the customer’s actions, thoughts and feelings throughout their journey, which is the customer experience journey.

The latter is viewed through the customer’s eyes, charting the complete path to and through your product, mapping every touchpoint from awareness to usage and retention. Some of the most cost-effective interventions and opportunities occur before and after the usage of the product.

The next step is to zoom into the point of the journey that needs improvement, which we refer to as Links (the L), or the touchpoint. These touchpoints connect to form the overall experience, like links in a chain. At this point, you have a clear view of where, along the customer journey, the biggest opportunities to make a difference lie.

Often, companies want to jump directly to fixing touchpoints, but without the insights of the previous stages, it is often based on blindly copying competitors and ending up with an undifferentiated offering that lacks any inspiration from your customers. It is no wonder we are surrounded by me-too products.

The O in our framework is for Organisation and is often the most difficult. However, it gets to the heart of the changes that the organisation needs to make to become more customer-centric.

A powerful tool to use here is the Service Blueprint. The blueprint is a map of the backstage processes that helps to break down both operational silos and siloed thinking.

For example, shouldn’t it be an easy win for my bank, where I have personal accounts and business accounts, to offer me a prequalified credit card or a car loan? It isn’t today because each product is run as its own business. This is often where innovators leap ahead; by creating efficiencies and agility that is aligned directly to customer needs and value, and this may be why your company is struggling to execute on a customer-centric strategy.

The HELO framework is a CX field guide with unmistakable guideposts to customer obsession. Run it as an assessment: how would your company fare? If the answer stings, it may be time to meet your customer again, and this time say “HELO”

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has been barred from collecting 16 percent value-added tax (VAT) from firms that link banks, mobile money operators and payment service providers, marking a major win for Kenya’s three main payment switch companies.

In a ruling on October 24, the Tax Appeals Tribunal faulted the KRA’s move to levy VAT on Kenswitch’s services, finding that the firm provides financial rather than ICT services.

The tribunal noted that these financial services are exempt from the consumption tax.

Kenswitch, which interconnects banks’ automated teller machines (ATMs) and point-of-sale (POS) networks, had challenged a tax demand of Sh41.6 million on the portion of interchange fees it received for switching services. The taxman argued that such services were ICT-based and therefore taxable.

However, the tribunal sided with Kenswitch, declaring that the company’s switching role is integral to the financial system and squarely within the VAT exemption.

‘The tribunal is persuaded that KRA erred both in law and in fact in finding that the appellant’s services are taxable under the VAT Act,’ the ruling stated.

‘The appellant’s services clearly fall within the meaning of ‘financial services’ exempt from VAT under Paragraphs 1(b) and 1(m) of Part II of the First Schedule to the VAT Act, 2013.’

It added that the VAT assessment of Sh41,637,843 issued on July 9 and confirmed on October 4, 2024, was ‘erroneous and unlawful’.

Besides Kenswitch, other licensed switch companies include PesaLink (operated by Integrated Payments Services Ltd-IPSL), a subsidiary of the Kenya Bankers Association.

Switchlink Africa, which supports fintechs and payment processors, is the third firm offering payment switch services.

A switch acts as the ‘traffic controller’ of Kenya’s digital payments highway, directing money and data between banks, mobile money operators and card networks.

These firms are licensed by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) under the National Payment System Act 2022, and related regulations.

The KRA had relied on the Banking Act to argue that Kenswitch was not a ‘financial institution’ and that its commissions amounted to software-related income subject to VAT.

It claimed the company used third-party software supplied through Mauritius-based EFT Corporation and global provider ACI Worldwide, and therefore its services were excluded from VAT exemption as ICT.

The tribunal dismissed this reasoning, noting that Kenswitch neither supplies ATMs nor sells software and that its core function is financial intermediation rather than ICT services.

In a card transaction, several parties are involved: the cardholder, the issuing bank, the acquiring (receiving) bank, a merchant and the switch company. The acquiring bank deducts an amount from the money due to the merchant for the transaction, known as a Merchant Discount Rate (MDR).

The acquiring bank pays the balance to the merchant and then apportions the MDR between the card companies, the switch payment service firm and the issuing bank. The money paid to the issuing bank is the interchange fee.

The tribunal faulted KRA for seeking to charge VAT on only one of these parties while leaving the other two unaffected.

The stakes around switching are set to rise as the country moves toward a national switch that will enable customers to move money across any mobile provider or banking institution promptly and at reduced cost.

The CBK has announced plans to develop a ‘single integrated solution with multiple functionalities (national switch).’ While mobile money already allows instant transfers between Kenyan banks and digital wallets, coverage often depends on bilateral agreements, leaving gaps.

As part of its National Payments Strategy, the CBK wants to introduce a financial sector-wide interoperability system to allow users to send and receive money instantly, regardless of the bank or financial institution they use.

Kenya’s payments ecosystem remains fragmented, with mobile money platforms like M-Pesa and Airtel Money operating separately from other financial institutions; for example, some banks and microfinance institutions still do not allow transfers to Airtel Money wallets.

Mobile money continues to dominate Kenya’s payments market. In 2024, mobile money services processed over Sh8.7 trillion, outpacing traditional methods like cheques (Sh2.48 trillion). High-value transfers through the Real-Time Gross Payment System stood at Sh27.86 trillion in the eight months to August.

Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms are emerging as a new frontier of digital disparity, with African users paying more to use global systems that process commands in the English language far more efficiently than local languages like Swahili.

The difference stems from how leading AI developers bill their services through tokens, as small text fragments that represent words or partial words used to process commands and generate responses within a model.

Global models, including those built by multinationals OpenAI and Google DeepMind, have been primarily trained on vast English-language datasets scrapped from the internet, academic publications, and books, giving the systems native efficiency in interpreting and generating English text.

When the same requests are made in Swahili, however, the models require between 30 and 50 percent more tokens to deliver the same output, according to open research data from American AI firm Hugging Face.

The difference translates into higher operating costs for developers, companies, as well as users who run AI tools or chatbots in African languages, since most commercial platforms charge per token processed.

In more practical terms, a Nairobi-based fintech firm building a Swahili-language virtual assistant could pay nearly half as much in API fees as a firm offering an English-only version of the same service.

This charging structure, described by African language researchers as a ‘tokenisation bias’, reflects an underlying gap in how global AI systems are trained and designed, rather than any deliberate pricing discrimination.

‘Language models learn statistical patterns from the data they are exposed to, and with English accounting for over 60 percent of the internet’s text content, most systems naturally optimise for it,’ asserts IT specialist David Waithaka.

‘African languages, which make up less than one percent of the world’s digitised text corpus, are therefore broken down into smaller sub-units by the model to match existing English-based patterns, increasing the number of tokens processed.’

That structural inefficiency, analysts argue, has direct commercial implications for the continent’s growing market, where language localisation is becoming central to new-age concepts such as digital government, e-commerce and customer support systems, among others.

African computational linguists have commenced research to correct the imbalance by building open-source language datasets and training models directly in local languages, as in the case of South Africa’s Masakhane and Lelapa AI, as well as AI4Afrika.

Masakhane has developed translation datasets for over 200 African languages, while Lelapa AI is training foundational models that natively handle local dialects and idioms without breaking them into inefficient token fragments.

Experts say these homegrown efforts are critical to ensuring that Africa’s digital transformation does not depend entirely on external systems that were not designed for its linguistic landscape.

‘We don’t have to translate who we are to be understood. AI shouldn’t charge extra for being African,’ observes AI trainer Nyandia Gachago.

Limited research funding and computing services, however, continue to constrain the progress of homegrown solutions, leaving the continent dependent on imported models whose performance and costs it cannot fully control.

If the imbalance persist, industry analysts warn, African businesses could be staring at a long-term structural disadvantage in adopting generative AI technologies, compared to regions where linguistic efficiency aligns with the global model training.

Kenya’s rapid digitisation of public services, including Swahili-language chatbots for citizen engagement, could also face cost implications unless local language models are developed to match global standards.

In May last year, tech giant Microsoft announced that it would support the development of an AI model in Swahili as part of its grand plan to invest up to $1 billion (Sh129.2 billion at current conversion rates) in Kenya’s digital ecosystem.

At the time, the firm said the initiative would be geared toward supporting Kenya’s unique cultural and linguistic needs in a development that was touted as the magic wand that would drive AI uptake among native communities.

Earlier in July 2023, Swahili had become the first African language to be onboarded to Google’s conversational generative AI chatbot known as Bard, alongside 40 other international languages that included Chinese, German, Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi.

Bard is Google’s experimental AI chat service whose function closely mirrors that of ChatGPT, with the only deviation being that Bard pulls its information from the web.