I remember sitting in a management meeting early in my career while the finance department presented its debtors book. The familiar complaints followed. Customers were taking too long to pay. Collections were difficult. Outstanding invoices were becoming a problem.
National output can expand while households and small businesses struggle with the cost of essentials, uneven income growth and tight working capital. To understand the gap, the headline figures need to be read alongside employment quality, household budgets and the cost of doing business.
On 4 September 2026, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a resolution encouraging a more accurate representation of the relative size of Africa and other parts of the world. For businesses looking at African markets, the timing is useful. Africa’s physical scale is enormous, and the commercial effort to connect its economies through the African Continental Free Trade Area is becoming increasingly important.
I attended the Africa’s Business Heroes 2026 Semi-Finals in Nairobi for the first time. I came in late for the afternoon pitches, so this is not intended as a comprehensive account of the competition. What I saw, however, was enough to leave me with several observations about entrepreneurship, investment readiness and what happens when a good business story is subjected to serious scrutiny.
For most of my career, support for MSMEs in Kenya was a side conversation. It happened in donor workshops, in the last agenda item of trade forums, in policy papers that circulated among the same fifty people. The businesses themselves were somewhere else entirely, doing the work, largely unwatched.
That has changed, and this week confirmed it.
If you drive through Arusha, you can’t miss it. It doesn’t look like a building. It looks like a promise. Rising from the dusty earth on the edge of the city, the structure is shaped like a shield and spear anchored by a massive drum. This is the Cultural Heritage Centre, a place that took years…
The Engine of Change Raila Amollo Odinga’s life story is not merely a record of a political career; it is the definitive blueprint for modern democratic resilience in Kenya. His journey, marked by immense personal sacrifice and driven by a structural, engineer’s mindset, reshaped the very architecture of the nation. He was the unwavering engine…
Stop Blaming Red Tape: The Real Reason Africa Is Stifled Is Predictability You think you know why African economies struggle, right? Overregulation. Too many rules. Endless permits. That’s the easy, comfortable answer. But our analysis says you’ve been looking at the wrong variable. The problem isn’t the quantity of rules. It’s the sheer, unpredictable mess of how they’re enforced. That…
Kenya’s credit information regime has matured, but one relic keeps taxing citizens for no added insight: the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) “Certificate of Clearance .” A certificate is just a dated status note. It adds nothing beyond what a standard credit report and the credit score inside it already tells an employer, lender, or tender…
Kenya’s SMEs contribute over 30% of GDP and employ more than 14.9 million people, the majority in informal and micro enterprises (KNBS, 2022). They are widely acknowledged as the backbone of the economy, yet in most conferences, exhibitions and award ceremonies, their voices remain secondary to those of policymakers, corporate sponsors and development partners. Having…
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