Author: David Indeje

Kenya’s micro-enterprise economy runs on the energy of millions of small traders, most of them women. These entrepreneurs sell produce at dawn, restock shelves by afternoon, and navigate cash flow with no safety net. Yet until recently, most managed their business and personal money in the same mobile wallet, with no clean record of what they earned, spent, or saved. A joint case study by Safaricom and the GSMA’s Connected Women programme documents how Pochi la Biashara, Safaricom’s merchant digital financial service, launched in 2020, is reshaping how women micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya manage money, protect income, and build a path…

East Africans are visiting restaurants more often, and what they want once they sit down has changed. Diners now expect healthier options, faster service, and an experience that justifies leaving the house, and that shift is forcing restaurants, and increasingly the supermarkets competing with them, to rethink everything from menus to where they open next. Dining Out Is Becoming a Habit, Not an Occasion Research from Mordor Intelligence tracking Africa’s foodservice sector found that dine in still represented about three quarters of restaurant transactions in 2025, while delivery is forecast to grow faster than any other channel through 2031. That…

Four decades after Titus Kiondo Muya founded a small building society in Nairobi with a KSh 500,000 loan and a conviction that ordinary Kenyans deserved better access to credit, Family Bank Limited began trading on the Nairobi Securities Exchange on June 23, 2026. The listing marks the largest private sector debut on the exchange in 17 years and signals a turning point not just for the bank, but for Kenya’s capital markets. Family Bank listed approximately 1.66 billion fully paid ordinary shares on the Main Investment Market Segment of the NSE at an introduction price of KES 18.00 per share,…

When the whistle blew to open the 2026 FIFA World Cup on June 11, it did more than mark the start of 104 matches across 39 days in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. I n Kenya, it signalled something rarer in pay television: a reversal of strategy by a company that had spent three years pricing itself out of its own market. DStv, now owned by French media conglomerate Canal+ following its KES 280.7 billion acquisition of MultiChoice Africa completed in September 2025, arrived at this World Cup with its back against the wall. The numbers tell a story…

Kenya’s internet story is, at its core, a smartphone story. Everything else is a footnote. The Communications Authority ‘s April 2026 Audience Measurement and Industry Trends Report makes that clear from the data up. An overwhelming 98.2% of Kenyan internet users accessed the web via a mobile smartphone in Q3 2025/26. Laptops trailed at 5.8%, Smart TVs at 1.2%, tablets at 0.9%, and desktops at a barely visible 0.6%. Any business, media house, or government agency still designing digital strategy around desktop screens has already lost the plot. The smartphone monopoly The scale of mobile dominance matters because it reframes…

Stanbic Holdings Plc delivered a great year in 2025, embedding sustainability so deeply into its operations that the word “compliance” no longer fits. What emerges from its 2025 Sustainability Report is a portrait of a bank that has moved from reporting on ESG to building its entire business model around it. Trade financing surged to KShs 133 billion, nearly 50% above its KShs 90 billion target. The D.A.D.A women’s platform crossed KShs 49.5 billion in cumulative loans disbursed. Over 200,000 trees were planted in a single year. For the first time, the Board formally adopted IFRS S1 and S2 disclosures,…