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BARAYAN: Are grassroots empowerment programmes impactful?

New ideas for attracting investments and creating employment are issues of great urgency to all stakeholders.

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by FATMA BARAYAN

Columnists23 May 2024 - 14:58
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In Summary


  • To make ends meet, the low-income earner shall inevitably attempt to start a venture to earn a little more to make ends meet.
  • One such source of hope is in the politicians and their sustainable grassroots empowerment programmes.

There are two methods often used by politicians to roll out these initiatives.The first entails loosely forming a large group of artisans within the same economic sector, construction, vendors or personal care, and empowering them with a financial grant to distribute among themselves.

The World Bank undertakes a lot of research through governments and in collaboration with other agencies and thereafter publishes very interesting data, some more complicated than others but all very detailed.

Within this complexity, they are able to simplify the conditions in each country to numbers which ranks them to a worldwide competitiveness.

Some of the 105 items of study include quality of roads, burden of custom procedures and public trust in politicians.

These documents inform would-be investors to the country yet the vast majority of the population in Kenya is not only unaware of these reports and their contents but would most probably not relate to them well.

Let us examine this in the eyes of a prospective local investor.

Low-income workers, who comprise 60 per cent of the total workforce in Mombasa earning under Sh35,000 have the following demands on their income: Domestic expenditure on food, beverages, school fees and personal care takes 57 per cent, while rent accounts for 25 per cent. Transport to and from work cost him 10 per cent, with entertainment and savings and investments making up five per cent and three per cent, respectively.

The quality of road directly affects commuter transport. A bad road reduces accessibility, resulting in time wastage or introduces a last mile factor, both of which could increase transport costs to 13 per cent of income.

In addition to labour costs, the investor must consider the question of what we may call “facilitative infrastructure”.

For any investor, if the entrepreneurial line of business entails custom clearance, a burdensome procedure would be disastrous. A delay beyond the free storage period attracts punitive costs of demurrage and long stay from the shipper and Container Freight Stations of up to Sh10,000 daily per container.

This translates to a monthly increase of 4.3 per cent in estimated cost of the cargo. With cost of imported input going up hence cost of production, job loss may occur as entrepreneurs find ways of getting the same amount of work done by a smaller number of people.


To make ends meet, the low-income earner shall inevitably attempt to start a venture to earn a little more to make ends meet. One such source of hope is in the politicians and their sustainable grassroots empowerment programmes.

There are two methods often used by politicians to roll out these initiatives.

The first entails loosely forming a large group of artisans within the same economic sector, construction, vendors or personal care, and empowering them with a financial grant to distribute among themselves.

This is often done once and in one event. An estimated 95 per cent of the recipients channelled the funds to consumptive expenditure, with only five per cent going into any form of investment.

The second category of empowerment is having artisans from diverse sectors of the economy form independent companies, with governance structures enabling collective decisionmaking.

Investment goals are identified, finances are secured and rollout is initiated, managed and constantly monitored.

This process takes time, as business plans are necessary and statutory compliance is adhered to. This can be frustrating to the beneficiaries, many of whom are not familiar with formal business practices. These are corporates owned by the community.

Empowerment is described as The process of obtaining basic opportunities for marginalized people, either directly by those people, or through the help of non-marginalised others who share their own access to these opportunities. It also includes actively thwarting attempts to deny those opportunities,’ while sustainability can be said to be the ability to maintain or support a process continuously over time

With these being the universal definitions, the success rate of the two methods can be assessed.

In Mombasa county, two political proponents have stood out as having mobilised funds from non-governmental sources, for sustainable grassroots empowerment. Each of them adopted their preferred and contrastingly different methods to sustainably empower the grassroots.

The results and relative successes of each have yet to be fully revealed, though the first does not indicate much promise. This is a topic I shall return to in due course.

For a historically marginalised region like the Kenya coast, new ideas for attracting investments and creating employment are issues of great urgency to all stakeholders.

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