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Sustainable finance disclosures for financial sector authorities

Sustainable finance is becoming an increasingly important form of finance for Africa. Key to anchoring sustainable finance effectively is understanding related disclosures and standards.

This presentation unpacks how the intersection of innovation, fintech and sustainable finance reporting and disclosure standards are creating an interesting future of supervision and regulation for financial sector.

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Blog

Climate action in Africa: Pathways towards resilient sustainable cities

Africa’s urbanization is increasing and remains largely informal, uncontrolled, and unsupported by the continent’s infrastructure. More people are moving to towns and cities, rapidly creating ‘informal’ settlements with limited access to urban services that people need.

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Blog

Drought, digital innovation, and money: How the hunger safety net cash transfer programme has transformed access to financial services in the arid lands of Kenya

Joyce Apus is a witty mother of eight who entertains visitors with her unconventional love story. How she met the man of her dreams in Kalokol, a small fishing community by the shores of Lake Turkana.

“He was light skinned,” she says. “You can see I am quite dark. So, I thought the children would have a fair complexion.”

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Affordable housing

Jenga Green Library: Promoting climate smart housing

Jenga Green Library is a directory of green building materials and services, developed by Kenya Green Building Society in partnership with Financial Sector Deepening Kenya, designed to be a one-stop-shop for displaying the entire supply chain of sustainable building materials and services.

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Blog

Partial Credit Guarantee Feasibility for Affordable Housing

FSD Kenya, on request by the Government of Kenya, undertook a feasibility study to create a Partial Credit Guarantee for financial sector players to enter into mortgages with buyers from lower income and informal sector segments.

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Article

AfyaPoa: Lessons and insights on delivering health micro-insurance to gig workers and informal entrepreneurs

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed an additional two million Kenyans into poverty. Health shocks are particularly devastating for low-income households, most of which lack access to insurance and hardly save towards such eventualities due to a myriad of competing daily priorities.

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Agriculture

Using Blended Finance to Navigate the Pandemic: How an Innovative Funding Vehicle is Helping SMEs Survive COVID-19 and Advance the SDGs

To reach the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, emerging economies require US $3.3 to $4.5 trillion per year in funding, but they face an estimated annual shortfall of US $2.5 trillion.

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Blog

Driving greener housing using regionally sourced cross laminated timber

FSD Kenya’s Affordable Housing team hosted a workshop to stimulate knowledge transfer and collaboration between Tanzania and Kenya on the use of ‘cross laminated timber’ (‘CLT’) in housing delivery on February 8th 2022.

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Blog

How can Africa benefit from the private sector’s growing interest in climate finance?

While the private sector across the world is on a journey towards greening their activities, COP26 marked a milestone so significant that it was termed the Business and Finance COP. In other words, COP26 made ‘climate action mainstream business’. But what challenges and opportunities does this newfound interest present for Africa?

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Blog

Putting women at the centre of inclusive finance

People’s ability to participate within the more formalised markets which characterise the modern sector of an economy is often conditioned by the degree of access to the financial system. Exclusion from finance can result in exclusion from opportunities to participate productively in value chains.

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Blog

A new approach to women’s economic empowerment: FSD Kenya’s Marsabit Pilot

In 2016 FSD Kenya branched outside our core financial inclusion remit to embark on a new pilot in Marsabit county where we sought to develop a more holistic approach to economic inclusion. The ambition was to deepen the value of finance in people’s lives, moving beyond financial access and use and investing in building capabilities and market linkages to enable finance to yield stronger impacts on livelihood resilience and growth. Our aim was to reach the extreme poor and especially women, who are not well served by the financial sector.

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Blog

How 2,000 Shillings is Changing the Narrative for Fisherfolk in Busia County

I knew this Focus Group Discussion would be an interesting one, but nothing
prepared me for what was about to go down in the next two and half hours.

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Blog

Reflecting on the 2021 FinAccess numbers

I love numbers, charts, infographics and digging into insights, especially from the robust FinAccess survey that FSD Kenya has co-led with the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) since 2005. Not just because I find it interesting, but because FinAccess is a temperature check for Kenya’s financial inclusion and financial health. FinAccess points us to the questions which remain open about how Kenya’s financial system can deliver on its promise  in meeting the needs of the real economy. As we closed 2021 with the FinAccess launch on the 15th of December, I had the honour of sharing some of these initial questions as I reflected on the numbers in my remarks. I look forward to exploring the answers with many across the sector as well as surfacing more questions that can lead us further down the path of a truly inclusive financial system for Kenya.

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Blog

State of the economy report

This state of the economy report is a data brief on the key macroeconomic and households developments in Q2 an Q3 of 2021 as follows

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Blog

An opportunity for county governments to attract climate finance

As the 2021 COP26 came to an end in Glasgow Scotland, consensus resonated around the need to substantially scale up funding for developing countries to assist with the costs of both mitigation and adaptation

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Blog

National Rating Bill 2021

The Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning has published a draft National Rating Bill 2021 to allow for stakeholder engagement. The Bill seeks to repeal the current Valuation for Rating Act of 1956 (Cap 266) and the Rating Act of 1963 (Cap 267) and seeks to modernize the rating laws to conform them to Article 209 (3) of the Constitution of Kenya 2010 which empowers county governments to impose property taxes.

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Blog

Can innovative finance help low-income households better cope with health shocks?

Health shocks have a debilitating impact, especially on low-income households. Such households often lack access to appropriate finance solutions such as insurance to cushion themselves against the related non-routine income expenditures.

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