GOVERNMENT
MPs find gaps in the rules for the KES 340 billion Safaricom-sale fund
Parliament's Finance Committee, chaired by Molo MP Kuria Kimani, says the policy behind the National Infrastructure Fund is missing risk-assessment frameworks, demand verification, conflict-of-interest disclosures and project viability standards. The fund holds KES 244.5 billion from June's sale of a 15% Safaricom stake plus Kenya Pipeline IPO proceeds, targets KES 5 trillion with private capital, and caps any single project at KES 68 billion with a minimum 7% annual return. The committee's point is blunt: the money arrived before the guardrails did.
Tech-ish
FUNDING
Watu Credit raises $7m in debt to keep financing bikes and phones
The Mombasa-born asset financier took the facility from AHL Venture Partners to fund working capital across its motorcycle, three-wheeler, smartphone and e-motorcycle books. Watu has originated more than 7 million loans since 2015 and now operates in eight African countries plus Mexico and Brazil. The number that explains investor appetite sits in Car & General's books: the NSE-listed firm owns nearly 30% of Watu, and its share of Watu's profit jumped 382% to KSh 2.04 billion in H1 2026.
The Kenyan Wall Street
POLICY
CBK drafts a "too big to fail" regime for Kenyan banks
A proposed framework for domestic systemically important banks would score lenders on size (40%), interconnectedness (30%), substitutability (15%), economic importance (10%) and complexity (5%), then sort designees into three buckets carrying an extra 0.5%, 1.5% or 2.5% of core capital. D-SIBs would face quarterly stress tests, annual capital and liquidity self-assessments and recovery-and-resolution plans, with 12 months to comply after designation. No bank is named yet; public comments close 7 November.
TechTrends KE
FINTECH
Co-op Bank's ELA offers women KES 10 million unsecured
The new proposition bundles unsecured business loans up to KES 10 million (KES 20 million secured) over 24 months, a 0.5% rate discount for women-owned firms, a three-month maternity repayment pause and financial training. The gap it targets is real — women are 48% of MSME borrowers but hold only about 26% of outstanding credit, and get KES 354 for every KES 1,000 lent to male-owned businesses. The caveat: much of ELA already existed as Co-op's Msamaria women's loan, and the discount still leaves borrowing near 14.6%.
Tech-ish
GOVERNMENT
KRA took the customs system down for 12 hours on a record-volume port
Sunday's scheduled iCMS maintenance ran 6am to 6pm with no customs entries, duty payments or cargo release orders processed — and no manual fallback or storage-fee waiver announced, at a port that moved 45.45 million tonnes in 2025, roughly 124,500 tonnes a day. The one-line notice contrasts with March, when stakeholder pushback shrank a planned 36-hour outage to seven. Next on importers' calendars: the switch to third-party electronic cargo seals from 15 approved vendors by 26 October.
Tech-ish
GADGETS
iOS 27 lands tonight — and it is old iPhones that gain the most
The update rolls out at 8pm Kenya time to iPhone 11 and newer, and Apple's reworked CPU scheduler does the heavy lifting: on a 2019 iPhone 11 Pro Max, apps open up to 30% faster, big photo libraries load up to 70% faster and AirDrop moves files up to 80% faster. Connectivity Assist auto-switches to cellular when Wi-Fi fails — useful on Kenyan home fibre — while the conversational Siri AI stays gated to iPhone 15 Pro and later. For a market that runs on hand-me-down iPhones, the speed work matters more than the new hardware.
Tech-ish
