The government has continued to provide services to the common citizen over the past decades.
The main focus has remained on the public investments to provide key public services such as education, health and road network communication.
Public investment stays crucial because it shapes the quality of people’s life.
Subsequently, it can be characterised as an antecedent to promoting economic and private investment in a nation.
Recently Kenya experienced a livid economic bottleneck.
The Covid-19 pandemic economic slowdown, the limping consumer spending leading to the ballooning unemployment, the distraught prolonged drought and spiking corruption and governance issues are some of the cited factors that continue weakening the public investments drive.
Currently, the government is flexing its muscle to heavily invest in the ICT sector as one of the recognized sectors and key contributors to the country’s GDP.
Today, Kenya boasts of taking the ICT regional leadership in terms of wide network coverage, broadband connectivity, ICT infrastructure, and other ICT supported services such as mobile money and mobile banking services.
This economic slowdown seems to have caught the attention of the business community, some fearing that the slow growth is somewhat inadequate to meet the nation’s private and public investments.
A country with low investments output enjoys a high level of consumption, but this could trigger an unbalanced economy with high current account deficits.
The government has several options, to achieve the desired economic investment recovery path.
It is suggested that it should fix and formulate potential policies and guidelines.
To navigate through this, measures such as sustainable policies in finance mobilization, adoption of sustainable investments such as creating a friendly digital investments environment, including loosening stringent business licensing framework are needed.
To this end, it will be prudent to strengthen capacity for the operationalization of public-private partnerships and leverage cooperative societies to support small enterprises owners and orientation of economic zones to boost foreign investments in Kenya.
We have reached a tipping point and a small integrated effort to recovery is necessary.
Sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing and tourism which were hard hit by the covid pandemic can still be pulsated to an integrated sustainable recovery.
In light of these challenges, the proposed impactful measures can help boost and turn around the discoloured investment flows and long-term sustainable growth to strongly improve and offer the services equitably to all citizens.
Edited by Kiilu Damaris
