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Kenya slipped out of the world’s top 100 most innovative economies, raising concerns about its ability to sustain a digital and knowledge-driven growth.

World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) uses roughly 80 indicators to assemble its Global Innovation Index (GII). They cover innovation inputs such as spending on research and development, and outputs such as patents and high-tech exports.

The value of payments made through cards fell to Sh521.3 billion in the 12 months to June 2025, compared to Sh594.2 billion in a similar period last year, cementing a trend of slumps attributed to an increase in mobile banking.

The use of bank cards for purchasing goods and services has declined over the last six years, with consumers increasingly opting for alternative payment methods such as cash and mobile money wallets.

‘Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’ – African proverb

If the first ascent of the creative founder is survival, the second is recognition. It is when passion, once doubted, begins to attract attention, when resilience forged in scarcity is suddenly visible to the world.

Consumption of cheap electricity at night and weekends by industries dipped to a four year low in the period ended June 2025 with 180.1 Gigawatt-hours (GWh) used, signaling reduced economic activity by the businesses and exit of big firms from the special tariff.

Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra) data shows that this was a decline of 19.9 percent from the 225 GWh used a year earlier by industries and electric vehicles (EVs) under the special tariff, commonly referred to as the Time of Use (ToU).

Increased importation of capital goods, including machinery and transport kits, pushed Kenya’s current account deficit to 2.1 percent of GDP at end of August 2025, compared to 1.6 percent a year earlier, indicating rising business activity and improving credit flows to the private sector.

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) says deficit widened to $2.84 billion (Sh367 billion) in August from $1.82 billion (Sh235 billion) a year earlier, but it is expected to moderate to $2.39 billion (Sh309 billion) or 1.7 percent of GDP by the end of the year.

The Court of Appeal has ordered APA Insurance to pay a manufacturing firm Sh58.6 million as compensation following a fire that gutted the firm’s premises, hardly two months after the insurance took effect.

The award is a 28.8 percent reduction from the Sh82.33 million that the High Court had awarded the manufacturer-Britind Industries Limited- in February 2023 before APA appealed the decision, claiming that the fire was ‘deliberately or wilfully’ started by the firm.

For 15 years, the Magical Kenya Travel Expo has chronicled the aspirations of Africa’s tourism sector. Its evolution from a national showcase to a continental marketplace is a narrative of genuine progress.

However, ambition alone does not build infrastructure or fund the visionary enterprises needed to secure the continent’s economic future.

The expo, which took place from October 1-3 at the Uhuru Gardens National Monument and Museum, addressed this profound disconnect between Africa’s tourism ambitions and the actionable capital required to realise them.

The integration of the African Tourism and Investment Forum (ATIF) into this year’s Magical Kenya Travel Expo brought a strategic focus to closing this critical investment gap. The ATIF discussion and deliberations ignited the continent’s unlocking of its vast, yet undercapitalised, tourism potential.

Kenya’s tourism earnings grew by 31.5 percent in 2023. The sector contributes a significant 8.5 percent to our gross domestic product and, as the Tourism Research Institute notes, supports more than 1.6 million livelihoods. Yet, without continued investment, this momentum will stall and the promise of inclusive prosperity will fade.

Continentally, the African Development Bank projects that tourism could become a $260 billion industry by 2030, but this forecast faces an estimated $1.8 billion annual infrastructure investment gap. Bridging it requires a deliberate, multifaceted approach to building resilient, inclusive, and sustainable tourism ecosystems.

That was the reason we embedded ATIF within the 2025 Magical Kenya Travel Expo.

The expo has long proven its value as Africa’s premier tourism marketplace, historically connecting thousands of delegates, hundreds of exhibitors, and a broad spectrum of globally vetted buyers. It has perfected the art of the travel sale, but the time has come to move beyond transactions and tackle the sector’s foundational issues: policy, capital and innovation.

ATIF shifted the conversation to those pillars, asking not just ‘what can we sell?’ but ‘how do we collectively build the Africa we envision through tourism?’

The theme, Magical Kenya: Unlocking Africa’s Potential through Sustainable Tourism, must be understood in its truest sense. Sustainability is not just about environmental conservation but rather creating an industry that is financially self-sufficient, resilient and capable of long-term growth.

This is where the forum’s function became critical. ATIF was designed to directly confront the investment gap by connecting Africa’s market-ready opportunities from eco-lodges and cultural heritage sites to smart tourism technologies with the investors, development finance institutions, and venture capitalists searching for them.

The expo is just the turning point. We must challenge ourselves and each other. Governments must move forward ready with streamlined policies that prove their investment readiness.

Investors must look beyond traditional assets to the transformative potential of community models and technology. And as an industry, we must collectively demonstrate that we are a unified, strategic sector worthy of significant, long-term capital.

The World Travel and Tourism Council forecasts that the sector could create 8.5 million new jobs in Africa by 2033, but that number is entirely conditional on investment flowing where it is needed most.

The forum was also the arena for essential dialogue between policymakers and the private sector. True progress hinged on this collaboration to improve the investment climate and dismantle the regulatory hurdles that impede cross-border enterprise under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The power of this focused investment is its ability to ripple outwards, stimulating the broader economy in ways that a simple tourism transaction cannot.

Capital directed into tourism does not remain isolated within a hotel’s balance sheet. It is the very force that funds the preservation of our culture, the development of creative industries like film, arts, music, the scaling of African-born technology, and the construction of green infrastructure. It empowers community-owned ventures, ensuring that economic benefits are distributed equitably and that local populations become the primary guardians of their own assets.

The setting of MKTE at Uhuru Gardens National Monument and Museum is a monument to freedom and pan-African unity, is deeply symbolic. Just as this site stands for Kenya’s historic struggle for freedom and unity, MKTE 2025, powered by ATIF, embodied Africa’s determined effort to unlock its own economic destiny through tourism.

The vision, the talent, and the opportunities have always been here and will always be within our grasp. What has been missing is a concerted mechanism to finance them at scale.

Does abnormal define the entrepreneurs and market leaders who refuse to play safe? Are the businesses that question every assumption unusual? Abnormal market leaders, don’t just think outside the box, they tear it apart.

Look around the Kenyan corporate scene – normal is overrated. Why? Because normal keeps companies stuck. Normal settles for slow growth, tired plans, predictable outcomes, responding to the easy stuff.

Abnormal is different, asking hard questions. Abnormal sparks new models, fresh markets, bold moves. Abnormal is where the future is built. Abnormal are the outliers at the refreshing edge of the normal curve. To stand out in a crowded market, should one take three steps to abnormal achievement with a focus on creating value by problem-solving, quick adapting and competing on time?

It’s a question of whether one is content with the status quo. There is a risk in hoping that an infusion of fluffy business jargon will be all that is required to survive another day. Not everyone is ready to break patterns, create new habits.

For those that are done with the average, hovering around the mean, to ignite real change requires a step into the abnormal. Normal solves yesterday’s problems. Abnormal creates tomorrow.

Your boss wants you focused, productive, not distracted. Business model of social media wants you scrolling, not thinking. And schools? They may be still busy preparing students for jobs that may no longer exist.

The world isn’t just changing. It’s accelerating. Blink, and you’re already behind. That’s why smart managers don’t spend their time glorifying stuff they learned back in the day.

Smart managers, at the edge of the normal curve, the abnormal, the outliers, are mastering a different set of skills that are much more likely to compound into unfair advantages.

We crave the Plato’s Cave of familiarity – believing the shadows on the wall are the reality. We don’t see the business world as it is, we see the events we want to see.

One – create value, solve a problem

At its essence, business is about creating and capturing value. It’s about noticing a problem, a need a customer has, and being able to solve it. Solving it with a product – service that they are ready to pay for. That’s the greater differentiator, ready to pay for.

Participants in Y Combinator, a legendary start-up incubation unit, are encouraged to sell their product, the customer solution, online to see if anyone is ready to pay for.

It may not even exist yet, they are taught to just test the waters to see if the market demand is there. After all, does it make sense to create a product that no one wants?

Wicked problem of university graduate unemployment is depressing. Parents have spent their hard-earned money, scrimping and saving, investing in four years of education that is designed to provide young Sarah with job that allows her to demonstrate her learned knowledge, skills and ‘can-do’ mindset.

Yet, the World Bank now reports that it can take up to five years for the typical Kenyan university graduate to obtain formal sector employment.

Reframe of the issue is asking: How can the young graduate obtain work experience the employer craves? How can they be taught to solve problems? If an applicant can demonstrate they can identify and come up a solution to a pressing problem an employer has, they would likely be hired on the spot.

Aim of education should be to inculcate a sense of curiosity, a love of learning, that allows the student to see the world through the eyes of their discipline.

The risk of AI is that it may stifle creativity, encouraging what has been described as ‘brain rot’. It shouldn’t be a replacement for critical thinking.

To be fair, research shows it’s a mistake to equate paper qualifications with intelligence. Some of the smartest, most productive Kenyan’s never attended university.

Two – adapt and evolve

Nothing stays constant. Even in business problem-solving, when one applies inductive logic, setting a [scientific method] hypothesis about what is happening, and goes about proving, or disproving, the best guess hypothesis shifts things, usually in unexpected ways.

Facts and figures one thought were true, often don’t turn out that way. Normal approach might be blame the data, saying this can’t be true.

Read: How do you see what others miss?

While some managers chase normal, the astute abnormal leader bends, twists and even breaks things – until something new emerges.

In fast adapting, they see possibility where others see problems. Ever-evolving, they ask questions that make people uncomfortable. They refuse to follow the linear because the future isn’t drawn in straight lines.

Three – time is the message

“The medium is the message” coined by Marshall McLuhan, means that the way information is delivered-the medium itself-has a greater impact than the content of the message. The properties of the medium, like the linear structure of print, or the visual nature of film, shape our thoughts.

Reality has at least two dimensions: physical space and time. Responding to a customer’s frustrating issue right away, sends a very different signal, in contrast to ignoring it.

Or, what may be for some, the ‘normal’ way of just letting something fall through the cracks, hoping that annoying problem may just evaporate.

Paying attention to responding, competing on the basis of time is the habit of market leaders. Conscientiousness remains a strong predictor of business success.

‘You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns” advised Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Imagine stepping into a restaurant where you cannot rely on your sight to walk to your table or pick up your fork or knife, and instead, the aroma of food and the feel of cutlery guide you.

That was the experience at Dining in the Dark at Nairobi’s Karen Country Club – an event that let diners experience what it is like to eat out as a blind person.

What’s the best way to buy a car – save up and pay cash, borrow from a bank, or lease hire? And is it better to sell and buy separately, or do a trade-in?

These are all valid and available options, with choice dictated on a case-by-case basis. Overall, there are five ways to get the things you want. Make them, steal them, barter them, pay cash, or get credit.

Those are life’s deals. There are no others. There is always a price to pay – the only option is in how and when you choose to pay it. This has been the case since Adam whittled woman out of a rib (make it), since club-wielding cave-man invented matrimony with violence (steal it), since JJ Hughes swapped Model T Fords for wheat crops in Uasin Gishu (barter), since the clink of the first cowrie shell in Gedi (cash), and since Dr Faust went on tick with Old Nick (credit).

Lawyers, accountants and salesmen have invented hundreds of different words to describe each of these processes in an attempt to bewilder, beguile and finally bedevil and behoof the benighted public to bethink them beneficent and by these parts to ensure the party of the second part has to pay the party of the first part such a huge part of his last part he’s got nothing left to part or party with.

“Make” embraces grow, manufacture, assemble, fabricate, construct…

“Steal” includes rob, burgle, thieve, defraud, embezzle, hijack, half-hinch, and some types of bribe/gift.

“Barter”, meaning swap, has been given fancy titles like trade-exchange; the word ‘inducement’ is in the vicinity.

And even plain-simple cash has notes and coins and cheques and debit cards and direct debits and standing orders and whatnot.

But the greatest creative skills have been reserved for different ways to describe credit.

The business of usury – so famously championed by Shakespeare’s trader of east Mediterranean extraction in an Italian town with wet streets – has been euphemised, bastardised, legalised and otherwise disguised by all manner of pecuniary poetry.

Colleagues borrow and give loans. There is I owe you [IOUs], and small things can be got “on tick” or on account. Bigger items require mortgages, lease hire, hire purchase, otherwise known as the “never-never” (leaving us unsure of whether the pain never starts or the paying never stops). The instruments of credit include pawn shops, overdrafts, credit cards, commercial papers, promisory notes, advances, drawing rights, loan sharks, refer-to-drawer scribbles, failure to get a second signature, the accountant is out at the moment, could you please send me another copy of the invoice, our computer crashed and we’re doing everything by hand, we’re waiting for a tax refund…

Call it what you like. Credit is credit. A get-now-pay-later system. And pay later must, by definition, mean pay more to finance the cost and the profit of a credit facility. It is that extra cost that distinguishes legitimate credit from theft or charity.

There is nothing new about the credit idea, nor the over-riding principle that it increases the price. Kenya’s motorists have been well aware of that for some time (approximately one century). However, they have been most familiar with the idea of buying a car from one person and borrowing the money to pay for it from somebody else.

That keeps things relatively simple. One deal on the price of the car. A separate deal on the price of the money. All clear-cut and clean from everybody’s point of view.

However, as almost everybody depends on credit to buy a car, motor companies could become dependent on finance companies to secure their sales levels and margins.

So, globally, the trend is for motor companies to offer their own finance schemes (they use their own resources or their huge corporate creditworthiness to borrow the money from financiers, and pass that on to their customers, at cost plus.)

So the motorist gets the car, and the credit from the same seller.

And that greatly increases the number of different ways credit can be packaged and promoted. Hot on the heels of come-ons applied to the car – like real discounts, or hidden discounts through inflated trade-ins, cashback, or such nonsense as “free” service – come gimmicks applied to the finance like no-deposit and low-deposit, zero interest periods, and pay-back deferrals; different names and games that affect tax liability, and so on.

In some ways, the co-ordination of all these elements by just one company maximises the potential for a special deal; but it also makes evaluation of that deal much more difficult because it is almost impossible to distinguish which part of what you are paying is covering which part of what you are getting, and therefore to calculate what’s a bargain and what’s a rip-off.

And the more bits and pieces that are rolled into the package, the better the bargain or the bigger the rip-off can be. The most all-inclusive motor package could, in theory, be the cheapest form of motoring. In practice, the most all-inclusive system is called car hire, and it is usually the most expensive form of motoring.

There are dozens of “new” schemes on the Kenyan market. None of them reinvent the credit wheel – but they all spin it in different ways. While the options proliferate and evolve, I offer no judgment, but here are a few principles to be going on with.

One: You are out there to buy a car, not a fancy finance scheme or bonus extras. So above all, select the vehicle first, on the vehicle’s merits. Your usage, your needs and values, your preferences.

Two: When you have chosen the right vehicle for your purposes, only then look at your different options for paying for it. Salesmen are often poor advisors – competitors make better research assistants.

Three: Whatever the sales pitch calls it, if you don’t pay in full and up-front, you are on a credit scheme. You are therefore buying not only the car, but the money with which to pay for it. Evaluate both purchases, separately, with equal care.

Four: There are some very good deals out there. But any deal that looks too good to be true, probably is. Caveat Emptor (Let the Buyer Beware) is not just a legal principle. It is good advice.

Finally, if it has anything to do with motoring (or any commercial human being, for that matter) mistrust the word “Free”. What the word actually means (‘you do not have to pay anything’) and what marketers mean when they use it (‘the cost has already been added to something you do have to pay for’) are not the same thing.