Blogs and publications

This presentation explores the link between social security and inclusive growth in the context of Kenya’s informal sector.

The expansion of Kenya’s informal economy since the 1990s presents growing challenges for policy makers concerned to ensure that Kenya’s growth is both robust and inclusive.

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.

he Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) partnered with FSD Kenya and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to undertake a study on the environmental risk exposure in the Kenyan banking sector.

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.

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.”

Technology has played and will continue to play a central role in financial sector development in Africa and in enabling Africans to access financial services and products.

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.

FSD Kenya partnered with Virtual City to better understand the value chains of fresh produce in Nairobi. The purpose of the assignment is to understand the operations of the packhouses by answering questions about finances, market information, constraints, barriers, and opportunities.

Kenya’s commitment to addressing climate change through green finance has progressively emerged as a key topic underpinning policy development in promoting sustainable development and financial market development.

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.

The performance of the global economy continues to be defined by the COVID-19 pandemic with the war in Ukraine worsening the outlook for the world economy and Africa. For Africa ,the war in Ukraine will exacerbate food insecurity, increase fuel and food production costs, and push up the cost of living. Key global risks include the emergence of new COVID-19 variants which could prolong the pandemic and induce renewed economic and supply chain disruptions, energy price volatility, and high uncertainty around inflation and policy paths.

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.

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.

Kenya’s progress on inclusive financial sector development over the past five years places Kenya at the front of the curve relative to its peers. But beneath its headline success story, falling financial health and growing disparities in financial usage point to underlying challenges that compromise the ability of financial inclusion to deliver on its promise for inclusive and sustainable growth.

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.

Among the Kamba of Kitui the domains of resource exchange and ‘saving’ include everyday Kamba terms (e.g. mukilye (uplifting)) that are ideologically charged . Characteristically, they entail implicitly understood Kamba values and norms of behaviour that are generally identified with among the Kamba of Kitui.

FSD Kenya partnered with the Overseas Development Institute’s program on Supporting Economic Transformation (SET) to research and better understand Kenya’s trade relationship with a focus on exports.

This document has been developed to provide a review of the regulatory framework for data protection in Kenya. The report takes a broad view of what constitutes the regulatory framework, going beyond the Data Protection Act, 2019 (DAPA) to include the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA).

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.

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.

The FinAccess Household Survey, commonly referred to as FinAccess, is a series of surveys jointly conducted by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) and FSD Kenya every two to three years to establish the level of financial inclusion, as well as to measure the drivers and usage of financial services in Kenya.