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.
Let me describe a week you have probably lived.
A tender lands in your inbox, apparently by invitation. The scope is real, the buyer is a name you recognise, the deadline is tight. You pay the document fee. You pull two of your best people off paying work for ten days. You build the proof of concept they asked for, print everything, and courier a sealed submission before the deadline with every compliance certificate in order.
Then nothing.
Large corporates quietly run supplier dependency assessments on their vendors. Most SMEs have never heard of this process. Here’s what it is, what triggers a risk flag, and what you can do about it before the conversation changes. Somewhere in your largest corporate client’s procurement team, there is a structured evaluation running on your business….
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…
Building With Purpose — and With Users “If you’re building without talking to your users, you’re not building for them — you’re building for yourself.” Silas doesn’t mince words when it comes to product design and SME growth. For entrepreneurs trying to launch or scale in African markets, he argues that the most dangerous assumption…
If you read the headlines, you might think Artificial Intelligence is a game reserved for Silicon Valley giants with billion-dollar budgets. You would be wrong. The World Bank’s Digital Progress and Trends Report 2025 just dropped, and hidden in the data is a massive signal for Kenyan businesses. Here is the reality: While Kenya is categorized as…
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