As the government continues to work out an adequate and fair response to the huge rise in virus infections and accelerating death rate, out of the box thinking is required. Complete area lockdowns hurt socio-economic development, while clearly helping to reduce Covid-19 infections. Yet reduced development devastates incomes, especially of the poor who even find […]
Over 40 percent of Kenyans have a bank account, and when one includes the use of mobile money over 80 percent enjoy access to formal financial services. Yet the penetration of insurance in Kenya stands at under 3 percent – and it is not rising. Understandably, many commentators therefore see huge potential for developing this […]
In my last column I wrote about John Ngumi’s quest for a vision of Kenya, one that will help us emerge from our national malaise and offer a national goal and purpose that can excite and focus us. Mr Ngumi worried that we live in a time of great cynicism and scepticism, with disbelief in […]
From time to time I am fortunate to be exposed to the highly thoughtful, well-informed and articulate WhatsApps of John Ngumi, and his most recent was one of his best. In it he asked for “an idea, a vision of Kenya, that will help get us out of our national malaise, will give us a […]
Last week I was invited by Prof Michael Hopkins to speak at one of his CSR Meetup events, these days inevitably online. Prof Hopkins has been running these for over ten years, and in different countries around the world. Now they are being co-hosted by Globethics, the Geneva-based global ethics network, and my topic was […]
Now that we all locked down at home, with much less to watch on television, many of us have been reading books that have for long been lying unopened on our shelves. I am certainly among them, and the first one that winked at me was The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump. I […]
(this was a presentation I gave on May 21, 2020 at the joint meeting of the Rotary Club of Nairobi with the Rotary Club of Kampala): It was 1978, and I had been living in Kenya for a year when an IT customer of mine, Bob Chase, invited me to join his Rotary Club of […]
After months of trying, our group of four is delighted that the government has taken its first steps toward guaranteeing a basic income for the poor and vulnerable population. The government has announced to the Senate Ad-hoc committee on Covid-19 that it has identified 250,000 households which will be put on a weekly stipend in […]
I’m glad I’m not President Uhuru Kenyatta, nor CSs Mutahi Kagwe and Fred Matiang’i, nor Governor Hassan Joho and others who have the awesome responsibility of communicating with the rest of us in ways that get us to behave responsibly during the Covid-19 crisis. Like leaders everywhere in the world they must act neither too […]
Much is being written about how the world will look after it has recovered from the coronavirus crisis. We have no idea about so many aspects of our social, economic and political futures, but one thing’s for sure: We won’t simply be going back to the way things were before the virus hit. The sudden […]
