On Thursday July 29th 2021, FSD Kenya made oral submissions to the Parliamentary Committee reviewing the Landlord and Tenant Bill 2021.

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.

Restrictions introduced in March 2020 to control the spread of COVID-19 have had a devastating effect on rural livelihoods in Kenya.

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. 

COVID-19 has underlined the need to fundamentally re-imagine the ways in which we produce and distribute resources.

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.

On the morning of November 3rd, 2020, I was honoured to be part of the launch of the Year of Climate Action in Kenya (#YoCaKenya).

Kenya has received world-wide recognition as leader in financial innovation. This is a laudable achievement because finance holds the potential to unlock solutions to the real-world problems that Kenyans face in their daily lives.

In this series of mini-interviews, researchers and respondents in the Kenya Financial Diaries reflect on their experiences. 

Parents across Kenya are receiving ambiguous messages about the timing of school re-openings amid the coronavirus outbreak.

In 2019, FSD Kenya and Turaco – a Kenyan microinsurtech startup providing simple, low-cost health and life insurance products to emerging market consumers – collaborated on a three-month pilot project in with a leading digital lender in Kenya. The study found that 80% of respondents were most interested in an in-patient cover to cushion the cost of hospital admissions, saying getting such insurance for free is incentive enough to repay their loans on time. Almost 50% of the treatment group opted in to having insurance payments added to their future loans, citing the idea of low-cost insurance from a financial service provider they know and trust as a key incentive.

The year 2020 will undoubtedly go down in history as the point in time when COVID-19 paralysed the world.

Between 7 September and 14 October, our team spoke with 207 participants from the Kenya Financial Diaries, tracing the ways COVID-19 was impacting their lives.

As we completed a new round of COVID-19 Diaries interviews in mid-October, we noticed a shift in the story of economic hardship.

On average, families in the Kenya Financial Diaries started to see improvements in their economic situation as of October 2020, but incomes are still far from normal.

Below, we’ll discuss the power of frameworks in shaping research and providing insights for financial inclusion policy and investment.