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The share of electricity imports has for the first time crossed the 10 percent mark as Kenya deepens its reliance on neighbouring countries to avoid power rationing and blackouts.

Data from the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra) shows that electricity imports accounted for 10.6 percent or 1.53 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of the 14.38 billion units bought by Kenya Power in the year to June, up from 4.87 percent in June 2023 and a paltry one percent in 2021.

The Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) has blamed a strong Kenyan shilling against the US dollar and poor tea quality from certain regions for lower tea bonus payments to farmers this year.

KTDA defended the payment, saying this year’s global trading conditions are beyond its control, but it has already adopted a plan to cushion farmers and stabilise their incomes.

Thousands of farmers serving 67 factories under KTDA factories were shocked to receive lower bonuses, with some reporting drops of more than Sh110 a kilo compared with last year’s earnings.

The agency, however, vowed to reverse the situation through a raft of strategies, including bigger trade in specialty tea. The regional auction in Mombasa traded its maiden batch of specialty orthodox tea on Wednesday last week in a strategy aimed at curbing the plummeting fortunes from dealing in traditional black tea.

During the sale, a kilo of orthodox tea fetched Sh622.93 ($4.82) compared to Sh270.11 ($2.09) for the traditional cutting- tear- and- curl (CTC) tea.

‘Looking forward, KTDA is taking steps to stabilise farmers’ income. We are expanding production of orthodox tea, which fetches higher prices in niche markets, to reduce reliance on CTC teas. We are working with the government to promote value addition, reduce packing costs, and open new markets, including China,’ read the statement.

KTDA is also investing in factory modernisation and energy solutions to cut costs and improve competitiveness.

In 2024, the Kenyan shilling traded at an average of Sh144 to the US dollar, while in 2025 the average was Sh129. This weaker exchange rate meant that even where international prices were stable, the amount realised in Kenyan shillings was significantly lower.

Average tea prices across regions reflect this challenge. In the East of Rift, Kiambu fetched Sh371 per kilo, a drop of Sh46 from last year, Murang’a earned Sh376, down by Sh42, Nyeri earned Sh388, down by Sh42, Kirinyaga earned Sh400, down by Sh38, Embu earned Sh404, down by Sh34, and Meru earned Sh381, down by Sh46.

In the West of Rift, Kericho earned Sh245, a drop of Sh101; Bomet earned Sh209, a drop of Sh85; Nyamira earned Sh266, a reduction of Sh106; Kisii got Sh246, a drop of Sh95, and Nandi /Vihiga earned Sh208, a drop of Sh66.

These are prices for made tea, and when converted to green leaf using the 4.4 ratio, they explain the reduced farmer payouts across the board.

In its statement dated September 30, 2025, KTDA said differences in the second payment between East and West of the Rift are due to quality factors, market dynamics, and costs, further reducing net earnings.

‘Independent producers and plantation companies in the West of Rift, outside KTDA, have reported similar difficulties, confirming that these disparities are market-driven and not unique to KTDA-managed factories. It is important that tea is not politicized,’ said KTDA.

From the gross revenues earned this year, KTDA has already factored in the monthly payments remitted to farmers and the operational costs covering processing, marketing, and logistics.

The final payment is therefore the balance after these obligations. While understandably disappointing to many, this year’s final is a direct reflection of global trading conditions beyond KTDA’s control.

The Employment and Labour Relations Court has upheld the dismissal of Java House’s former Chief Operating Officer (COO) Leonard Mudachi on account of redundancy nearly 10 years ago, citing lack of evidence to support his claims that he signed the exit package under duress.

At the same time, the court directed that he be paid $208,293.75 (Sh26.9 million) being the value of his shares at Nairobi Java House Limited and Java House (Mauritius) Limited Long-Term Incentive Plan scheme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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