Category: East Africa

Kenya will spend Sh2.2 billion on acquiring 720,000 cooking gas cylinders and several refill plant machinery through a State-owned fuels dealer as it rolls out a programme to entrench use of the commodity among low income households. The State Department of Petroleum Principal Secretary Engineer Andrew Kamau said the move would help the government avail affordable cooking…

Audit firm KPMG has recruited 107 graduates to join its Kenyan operations, kicking off the hiring season for the Big Four Nairobi-based international accounting firms. KPMG’s move bucks the recent trend where staff cuts have loomed large as multiple companies have sent home thousands of employees, citing an unfavourable business environment. An additional 43 recruits…

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) advisory committee meets next week with analysts projecting it will leave the benchmark lending rate unchanged. Ahead of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), analysts interviewed forecast the rate to remain steady as the shilling shows signs of resilience, with the country’s foreign reserves rising gradually. The inter-bank rate is…

Commercial banks are under pressure to introduce new chargeable services or raise fees on existing offerings in the wake of interest rate caps, analysts say. Standard Investment Bank (SIB) says in a new report that lenders underpriced transactions before the introduction of interest rate controls when they relied more on the lending business, which is…

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is providing a $3 million (Sh309.8 million) loan to fund the expansion of Goodlife Pharmacy in Kenya and Uganda. In a notice, the institution says the loan was part of the funding needed for the pharmacy to grow its footprint from the current 32 to 100. IFC estimates that the…

A global hotels, tourism and leisure consulting firm has named Kenya East Africa’s hottest investment spot, where 24 multi-billion five-star hotel projects are currently underway. The just released ‘TopHotelProject’  analysis by Horwath HTL South Africa said Kenya was ahead of Africa’s richest country, South Africa (16), Ethiopia (23), Algeria (12), Cape Verde (12), Tanzania (11)…

Kenya Airways has reported a Sh2.61 billion loss on the sub-lease of its aircraft, indicating the heavy burden that the national carrier continues to shoulder from previous years of rapid expansion that was not matched by proportionate growth in customer demand. KQ, in its freshly released annual report for the year ended March 2017, says…

The value of transactions facilitated by representative offices of foreign banks in Kenya doubled to Sh239.7 billion last year, indicating they are taking a larger role in arranging financing deals in the country. The banks’ offices mainly facilitated deals in syndicated lending, specialised, project and trade finance, Central Bank of Kenya says in the 2016…