Category: Business Daily

About a decade ago, the term ‘CNA’, certified nursing assistant, was largely unfamiliar in Kenya, save for those who had working relatives in the US, Canada, Germany or the UK.

In healthcare, the career path was straightforward-parents often sent their children to train as nurses, doctors, clinical officers, pharmacists or lab technicians.

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Kenya Power is seeking to buy 100 megawatts (MW) of hydropower from Uganda under a power purchase agreement (PPA) to replace the current deal between the pair cementing Kenya as a net importer of electricity amid rising demand.

Joseph Siror, the managing director of Kenya Power, on Tuesday disclosed that the arrangement could offer Kenya with power priced at not more than $0.09 (Sh11.6 at current rates) per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

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The Employment and Labour Relations Court has faulted the Standard Chartered Bank Kenya for unfairly dismissing a branch manager accused of failing to act on a sexual harassment complaint lodged by a staff member.

In its judgment, the court found that the termination of Carolyne Mithano was biased, rushed, and procedurally flawed. While ruling on Ms Mithano’s case against her dismissal, the court determined that the bank unlawfully terminated her employment and that the disciplinary process was predetermined, citing an instance where one panelist had described her as “unfit” before the hearing.

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Kenyan digital creators earned Sh45.1 million in brand collaborations during the first year of TikTok’s commercial operations in the country, boosting the platform’s local creator economy as advertisers deepen their shift to short-form video.

Data released by the Chinese video-sharing platform show that more than 200 Kenyan creators collectively earned over $350,000 (Sh45.1 million) during the year ended January 2026 through partnerships facilitated under TikTok’s local commercial framework.

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The public procurement watchdog is pursuing 221 constituency offices, three counties, and a number of State agencies for failing to deduct a new levy when paying suppliers and contractors.

The offices are being pursued for breaching the law, which requires them to deduct 0.03 percent of payments to contractors and suppliers, as the Public Procurement Capacity Building Levy.

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For many organisations, HR has become synonymous with compliance. Policies. Approvals. Controls. Risk registers. Sign-offs. In highly regulated environments, this instinct is understandable. But somewhere along the way, compliance stopped being a foundation and quietly became the strategy. That shift is costing organisations more than they realise.

Compliance-first HR is reactive by design. It focuses on avoiding what might go wrong rather than enabling what could go right. Decisions are framed around risk mitigation instead of value creation.

New ideas are slowed down by approvals. Managers are trained to ask, ‘Is this allowed?’ rather than, ‘Is this effective?’ Over time, HR becomes the department of no. And when that happens, innovation moves elsewhere.

The irony is that compliance was never meant to replace strategy. It was meant to support it. Labour laws, governance frameworks, and internal controls exist to protect organisations and employees, not to paralyse them.

Yet in many workplaces, HR energy is disproportionately spent on ticking boxes while deeper people challenges go unaddressed. Poor leadership behaviour is tolerated because it is harder to confront than a policy breach.

Engagement issues are documented instead of solved. Performance problems are managed through forms rather than conversations.

This approach also weakens HR’s influence. When leaders only experience HR through audits, warnings, and process enforcement, they stop seeing HR as a strategic partner.

HR is invited late into conversations, often after damage has already been done, and expected to clean up rather than co-create. That is not a seat at the table. It is a safety net.

Compliance-first HR also struggles in moments that require speed and judgement. The modern workplace is shaped by hybrid work, multigenerational teams, rapid skill shifts, and constant change. These realities demand discretion, context, and human judgement.

Policies alone cannot guide leaders through burnout, conflict, ethical dilemmas, or cultural breakdowns. When HR hides behind rules instead of exercising influence, employees feel unseen and leaders feel unsupported.

None of this suggests that compliance is optional. In fact, strong compliance is non-negotiable. But it should be the baseline, not the headline.

The most effective HR functions treat compliance as hygiene and invest the rest of their energy in leadership capability, culture, workforce planning, and employee experience. They use policy as a guardrail, not a handbrake.

A shift away from compliance-first HR requires courage. It means HR professionals must move from being rule enforcers to trusted advisors. It requires stronger commercial understanding, better data storytelling, and the confidence to challenge leaders when behaviour contradicts values, even when it is uncomfortable.

It also means acknowledging that sometimes the resistance to change does not sit with leadership alone. At times, the rot is in HR too, when we choose safety over impact.

As organisations prepare for a new year of uncertainty and opportunity, HR must ask itself a hard question. Are we protecting the organisation from risk, or are we helping it grow? The future of work will not be shaped by those who simply follow the rules, but by those who know when to uphold them and when to evolve beyond them.

If HR wants to remain relevant, trusted, and influential, the shift must start now. Compliance should keep us safe. Strategy should take us forward.

Real estate investors are expected to hold back on launching new projects for 2026, instead opting to complete ongoing ones and absorb completed units, a new market tracker says.

A review by real estate firm Knight Frank showed that real estate investors have adopted a cautious wait-and-see strategy on election-related uncertainty, with supply largely limited to completion of ongoing projects.

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The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has received backing from the Tax Appeals Tribunal to tax unexplained bank deposits in the fight against tax evasion.

The tribunal ruled that money flowing into bank accounts is presumed to be income unless the savers can prove with documents that the cash is not profits.

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Over the past two decades, property investments have grown in popularity, becoming an essential asset class in the investment realm. As a result, the property market has emerged as a significant option for investors seeking alternative investments.

While globally, industrial real estate is seen as a key investment asset class, whereby its quality provision leads to both macroeconomic and microeconomic gains as supply chain infrastructure in East Africa, it is primarily seen as a pure cost line item, delivered in the form of godowns through non-institutional platforms.

Across developed markets, approximately $50 billion was invested in warehousing between 2021 and 2024 alone, and majorly this was undertaken through the growth in Industrial REITs.

For investors seeking exposure to high-demand industrial assets without direct property ownership, industrial REITs offer steady income, diversification, and long-term property growth, without the need for large capital outlays such as when one decides to invests directly (either through the acquisition of a building or the development of a project as examples).

In Kenya, the convergence of a rapid population growth, a young and urbanising middle class, growing internet penetration rates and government efforts to improve overall infrastructure, has made the country’s real estate market a fundamentally sound investment.

The continued development of county industrial parks and Special Economic Zones has positioned Kenya as a regional economic hub that has the potential to drive sustained economic growth.

For decades, Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), just like its peers in Africa, primarily offered local-currency instruments: equities, government bonds and the occasional REITs. While REITs are not new to the Kenyan market, the broader adoption has been stunted by limited liquidity, scant investor awareness and the perception of industrial REITs as niche products.

In recent years, the opportunity has been immense. Industrial REITs specialise in properties that support supply chains and distribution networks, such as warehouse and logistics centres, distribution hubs, cold storage facilities and e-commerce fulfilment centres.

It is against this background that the approval of the Africa Logistics Properties Industrial REIT (ALP REIT) represents a bold leap forward in the evolution of regional capital markets by elevating the NSE as a destination for global investors.

As East Africa’s first Industrial Income REIT and the first USD-denominated REIT to list on the NSE, the move signals a maturation in both real estate and capital market innovation which is poised to deliver stable hard-currency returns, strengthen investor confidence, and catalyse long-term economic growth.

Additionally, by seeding the REIT with operational industrial assets, including modern logistics parks in Tatu City and Tilisi, the trust demonstrates its readiness to generate immediate income.

Another factor that underscores the significance of the ALP REIT is its admission as the first inductee into the NSE Sustainable Finance Centre of Excellence, an initiative supported by organisations such as FSD Kenya, which aims to promote environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles across capital market instruments.

Previously not considered a viable alternative asset class, industrial real estate is now emerging as an attractive investment due to its role in supporting economic development in the country.

Being recognised as a green issuance positions the ALP REIT to attract impact-minded investors seeking ESG-aligned opportunities.

As sustainability considerations become central to investment mandates, a green credential on a major African Exchange enhances the product’s global competitiveness through the development of modern, efficient logistics facilities that have the capability to reduce energy consumption, lower operational costs, and appeal to multinational tenants prioritising sustainability in supply chains.

The preferential tax breaks provided by the government positions REITs as a beacon for the future of East African investment markets by broadening investor choice, deepening capital markets to accelerate industrial development across the region.

The National Treasury will publish in advance the size of debt it will restructure through buyback, switches and swaps to bring more transparency in Kenya’s debt management strategy.

The Treasury’s liability management operations mainly involve the replacement of maturing instruments with new debt that features a longer tenure and/or low interest payments.

So far, early full or partial redemption of government bonds from proceeds of new securities has been done on a random basis, without prior disclosure of their scale.

Kenya has already deployed some of the initiatives to ease pressure on the debt service costs, including buybacks on Eurobonds maturing in 2024, 2027 and 2028, and most recently, a currency swap on debt taken to fund the construction of the standard gauge railway (SGR).

‘The National Treasury shall budget for liability management operations within the national budget and fiscal framework,’ said the Treasury.

‘A specific LMO (Liability Management Operations) vote line in the annual budget estimates under the public debt management shall be provisioned with adequate estimates every year.’

The liability management policy has also proposed interventions to strengthen institutional and technical capacity, including establishing a liability management unit at the public debt directorate to analyse debt portfolios, plan and inform budgeting for LMOs.

Buybacks have been mostly utilised to ease refinancing pressures on upcoming Eurobond maturities where the Treasury has issued new sovereign bonds to partially refinance expected principal repayments, prolonging the maturities in the process.

The early buyback of Kenya’s debut Sh258 billion ($2 billion) Eurobond maturing in June 2024 was, for instance, crucial in ending investor jitters over a potential sovereign default, which sent the Kenya shilling to its lowest level on record in January 2024.

Kenya partially paid an estimated Sh186.1 billion ($1.44 billion) from the maturing note by issuing a new Sh193.5 billion ($1.5 billion) Eurobond with staggered maturities in 2029, 2030 and 2031.

The Treasury conducted two more buybacks in 2025, making early repayments to Eurobonds maturing in 2027 and 2028 and brought down expected payments to Sh27.4 billion ($213 million) and Sh47.9 billion ($372 million), respectively, at present from Sh116.1 billion ($900 million) and Sh129 billion ($1 billion).

Kenya plans to make further early Eurobond repayments, including through an issuance funded by a debt-for-food security swap, which has a Sh129 billion ($1 billion) guarantee from the United States International Development Finance Corporation.

The early buyback will address the runaway costs of serving Eurobonds, which are estimated at Sh84.73 billion for the financial year running to June 2026.

‘The targeted transaction in liability management this year is that we are working on a debt-for-food security swap, which we expect to conclude by the end of this financial year,’ said Raphael Owino, the director general at the Public Debt Management Office.

The Treasury has utilised switch bonds to contain domestic smoothing risks associated with maturing domestic debt. A bond switch or swap occurs when investors holding one bond sign up to convert their claims into another security-usually a longer-term paper-that will most likely have a different interest rate.

The Treasury brought its first domestic switch bond in June 2020, offering investors a six-year infrastructure paper in exchange for a maturing one-year Treasury bill.

A second switch bond sold in December 2022 targeted holders of maturing Treasury bills and offered a Sh87.8 billion six-year infrastructure bond, raising Sh47.8 billion.

Last month, investors who held a 10-year bond maturing in August 2026 agreed to rollover Sh26.49 billion into a 15-year bond, the first switch in the current fiscal year.