[Kenya Business Week] Power to businesses
As Kenya now fully recovers from a grueling election that took a toll on its economy, key sectors are experienced renewed resurgence and the business climate is promising.
This week, the country has made major strides across public and private sectors as it seeks to remain the economic giant of the region.
President Uhuru Kenyatta commissioned an ultra-modern 220 Kv gas insulated substation to improve the power supply in Nairobi. The substation, the first of its kind in East and Central Africa, will handle the power coming from the Olkaria Geothermal Power Station and will create an alternative power chain for the city.
And still on matters energy, the country’s public utility company Kenya Power announced a reorganization of its corporate structure for improved customer service and effective management operations in line with its new business growth strategy.
Notably, was the formation of the Commercial directorate that will help the Company focus on its customers categorized in three main segments: large power users, small commercial users, and domestic and emerging users.
This comes even as the company sought to put its house in order by blacklisting contractors for substandard work, failure to submit proper documentation and in certain cases interfering with the tendering process.
The Kenyan consumers continued reeling from the impacts of the 2017 general elections with the spend on expenditure recording a steady decline from June to March 2018 according to mSurvey’s platform Consumer Wallet.
This is a departure from an earlier survey by the same firm last year that indicated that Kenyan consumers remained resilient during the election period.
But as consumers’ purchasing power shrunk, mobile service provider Telkom Kenya was expanding its 4G coverage in more prime areas around the capital city and its environs, in a modernization strategy meant to improve customer convenience.
This, coming at a time when the telco has been investing in partnership and new products to reach expand its market reach. It recently sold 723 towers to global tower company, American Tower Corporation as it seeks to improve the quality of its service.
It also ventured into the mobile money market taking on the telecommunication giant Safaricom with T- Kash that allows deposits, withdrawals and e commerce.
Safaricom on the other hand hasn’t been sleeping on its laurels and has recently rolled a cocktail of groundbreaking of services to remain competitive.
The ‘Safaricom Twaweza Live’ campaign for example is meant to interact with customers across the country while, a strategy guided by its foundation that focus on health, education and economic empowerment. The giant telco has also invested in a social messaging app that will link to its mobile money platform in an attempt to move the company into the application business.
