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.

Globally, fifty-six percent of the unbanked adults are women. In Kenya, the situation is similar. More women are unbanked, in comparison to men. Various steps have been undertaken to address the financial exclusion of women, and though the gender gap has been narrowing over time, it persists.

FSD Kenya in partnership with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and the Central Bank of Kenya and FSD Kenya ran a survey of micro businesses (MSEs) to track the impacts of COVID-19 on this population. Based on a sample of microbusinesses drawn from the FinAccess 2019 household survey, the survey tracked key metrics such as business revenue, customer flow, employment, use of finance and challenges faced by MSEs between February 2020 (before the pandemic) and July 2021.

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

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 Covid-19 pandemic has raised the profile of climate finance globally adding momentum to the $100 billion in climate finance that was promised by rich countries in 2009.

This research seeks to unearth the financial needs and demands of urban female retail traders in Kenya by exploring how their financial needs are being met, through which instruments, and in turn, where the opportunities lie to drive improved or increased access to financial products.

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…

2020 was an epic year for mobile money. The Covid-19 pandemic, and the responses to it, precipitated an increase in mobile money usage by nearly every metric.

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.