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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The earning population in Kenya has risen by May 2021 from a low point in June 2020; but median income has gone down reflecting pressure on the wider economy. Check out the latest wave of the FSD Kenya COVID 19 Tracker to find out more…
Through its AfyaPoa range of products, Insurance for All (IFA) has been delivering affordable and relevant protection to underserved Kenyans in the informal sector for over two years. Intending to broaden its reach through new gig economy partnerships and strengthen and improve its products and distribution approaches, IFA, with support from FSD Kenya and research assistance from 17 Triggers, conducted a four-month research and design phase followed by a six-month pilot.
Recent technological innovations in Kenya are going far in supporting the growth of Kenya’s affordable housing market, by providing an opportunity to leapfrog the less flexible systems that have dominated housing supply in the past.
In November 2020, FSD Kenya was invited to co-chair a session at the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Development Symposium. The 2020 symposium, bringing together experts and mid-career professionals from sciences and social sciences, debated the question: ‘How can we build resilience in world of shared resources?’. The symposium focused on 3 areas: economic resources, human resources and natural resources. FSD Kenya was asked to co-chair a session on economic resources together with Eka Ikpe of Kings College London.
Rather than a ‘cost’ to the state, social protection is an essential component of any sustainable, national economic growth strategy. Most of the world’s successful economies are significant investors in social protection, with spending across the OECD averaging 12 per cent of GDP.
The COVID-19 pandemic, termed ‘the Great Disruption’ hit the global economy in 2020 and was defined by divergent impact within and between economies. 2021 is already being defined by multispeed and divergent recovery in the global and local economies.
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