A UNAIDS study in the year 2000 on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Kenya predicted that the scourge would leave the Kenyan economy one-sixth smaller than it would have been in the absence of HIV/AIDS. Well, the pandemic has wreaked more havoc both on the economy as well as business.

Not only has the scourge adversely affected productivity and costs, but HIV/AIDS continues to have an invidious effect that is unquantifiable but yet profoundly impacts enterprise.

Absenteeism is usually the first and most common impact on business productivity. The number of days an employee reports to work can be measured, but this can also be a trigger for discord in labour relations when other healthy workers have to shoulder the responsibilities of the absentee.

The next impact is usually a loss of vital skills, which in turn makes entrepreneurs hesitant to invest in training for their employees. Most times, when a small business owner sponsors an employee to training they also expect that this employee will act as some sort of champion of the newly learned skill or knowledge, spreading it amongst the other employees. Thus the loss caused by AIDS doesn’t just end with the illness or death of that employee.

Finally there is the emergence of a loss of morale amongst the other staff members. What else can you expect when attending funerals of colleagues and their family members becomes a common event.

On World AIDS Day, the National AIDS Control Council should salute small businesses that take measures to protect their workers who are uninfected, whilst offering appropriate support and services to those who are infected. These are the entrepreneurs who are on the front-line fighting the scourge that threatens to shrink and sink the economy.

The government on its part could also provide incentives to small business entrepreneurs by introducing tax incentives for greater involvement in AIDS prevention.

This week in Parliament, Prime Minister Raila Odinga made a statement on the Kazi kwa Vijana programme.

Though he accepted that the initiative had weaknesses (mainly administrative), the Prime Minister stated that his ministry will integrate the implementation arrangements for KKV and those of the Economic Stimulus Programme to ensure community level participation and maximum efficiency.

Read:

• Ministerial statement on Kazi Kwa Vijana
• Kazi kwa Vijana Manual

The Committee of Experts on Constitutional Review in line with its mandate drawn from the Constitution of Kenya Review Act 2008 has been in the process of writing a new constitution. As part of the requirements set out in the Act, the Committee is expected to prepare and publish a Harmonized Draft Constitution and preliminary report. Thereafter the draft will be subjected to public debate for a period of 30 DAYS. During this period the public will be at liberty to forward comments and proposals to the Committee for consideration.

In line with the foregoing, the Committee is pleased to announce the launch of the Harmonized Draft Constitution on Tuesday 17^th November 2009 at the KICC Tsavo ballroom at 9.30 am. In this regard, the Committee wishes to invite you to be part of this important national occasion in the quest for a new Constitution for Kenya.

The Committee looks forward to your attendance. Thank you.

Director, CoE

RSVP civic@coekenya.go.ke

Read the Harmonised Draft of Kenya’s Constitution here

Tenders Unlimited is a new Kenyan startup founded by young entrepreneurs that provides dedicated database access to government and NGO tenders for business people. With the shift in technology moving towards major use of the internet, the portal provides a convenient and economical way for business people to search for tenders online. We recently got the opportunity to interview one of the portal’s founders Jeconia Omondi Olonde.

Read the interview here

The Government of Kenya has appointed a Committee of Experts to identify contentious issues in the Constitution review process, develop consensus and make proposals for a new draft Constitution for Kenya.

Inevitably this is a political process due to the various interests that musts be considered for the draft Constitution to gain wide spread support. It is also a legal process that will either determine the new laws to be established in order to conform with the Constitution or “constitutionalize” existing laws.

Youth organizations made submissions made to the Committee of Experts on contentious issues as seen by young people and suggestions on how to address them. In July 2009, several young people from around the country convened in Nairobi to discuss the various submission and made attempts to build consensus.

At the end of the meeting it was clear that there remained several issues on which consensus needed to be developed. This remains the challenge for the Committee of Experts.

As young people, some who have been part of the constitutional review processes through the years, and others for whom it seems “new there are questions we must ask as responsible citizens to ensure quality contribution towards building consensus in the constitutional reform process.

• What are the key things we should ask ourselves as we prepare for a new constitutional dispensation?
• What spirit do we wish for the Constitution to have?
• What are our basic minimums as young people for a “suitable” constitution?
• What basic principles we should consider as we undergo the constitutional reform process?
• What is our contribution as young people to the reform process?

On Tuesday 3^rd November 2009, there will be a meeting at the ACK Diocese Hall in Nakuru to deliberate on these matters from 4 p.m.

Quick facts:

Venue: ACK  Diocese Hall – Nakuru

Date: Tuesday, 3rd November 2009

Time: 4.00PM

The government’s decision to reinstate Mr. Umuro Wario to continue serving as the Chief Executive Officer of the Youth Enterprise Development Fund should be highly lauded. It’s a point of victory for public officers who risk their jobs by committing themselves to fight corruption.

Kenya’s biggest problem with the war against corruption has always been having the corrupt have their day whenever they fight back. This has happened to so many competent people before. A number of committed and hardworking officers have often lost their jobs whenever they showed determination to fight graft. A few years back it was confirmed that in Kenya, corruption fights back. It happened to Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei who lost his job and died in agony after he revealed how Kenyans had lost billions of shillings through the Goldenberg scandal. The same nature of machinations worked so hard to remove true anti corruption crusaders from transparency international. It was such kind of behind the scene political games by some board members that two very competent CEO’s Mwalimu Mati and Gladwell Otieno were consecutively removed from TI Kenya. Transparency International is just one example among many where officers committed to sincerity end up losing their jobs because of the greed and immorality of some of the board members of those institutions.

The minister in charge must be lauded for taking a bold action and making the truth carry its day by re appointing Mr. Wario. The  minister has shown that if we all work for the truth, the just will always get justice too.

The initial sacking of Mr. Wario was like condemning those who fight corruption within the institutions where they work. This is because the ground of dismissal was based on the fact that he didn’t cooperate in the approval of some questionable deals pushed by the board. He must be lauded for standing strong in the interest of Kenyan youth when he refused to approve a ‘loan’ of ksh.300million to a Canadian NGO. Its noticeable that some politically connected board members wanted to use their political influence to blackmail the CEO into approving projects that mattered to their own selfish interests and not in the interest of the Kenyan youth.

It’s important that the minister was able to rescind her own earlier move of sacking the YEDF CEO after finding out the truth.

As the minister appoints new board members it’s important to ensure that new faces are put on the board to make the YEDF operate without any external coercion from various political interests as it has been before. The minister should now move to ensure that the board is fully reconstituted to include people who will work in the interest of the Kenyan youth and not those who will end up arm-twisting the CEO to give’ loans’ to foreign NGOs. A new board I believe will come up with a new way of implementing the youth projects and also oversee the funding of the youth groups by merit and not through political manipulations.

Wario is one of the competent young people who are emerging   in providing leadership in different sectors of our economy and it’s wrong for individuals to use tribalism or any other form of bigotry to sabotage such talents. He is also is famed for having rolled out the audit of the Kenya’s free primary education when he worked for the ministry of education.

I really wish that other ministers and government officials emulate the youth and sports minister Prof. Hellen Sambili and stand and support the truth always whenever circumstances of this nature arise. Through this, we shall achieve a lot in our war against nepotism and all other forms of corruption. It must be fought from all corners and sacking public officers who help fight it is not one of the methods of ridding our society of graft.

FWAMBA NC FWAMBA

It’s a common site in most African cities – waste dumping sites where hundreds of scavengers search daily for pieces of scrap metal, plastics and other waste materials to sell for a profit. These scavenger entrepreneurs though are risking their lives in search of money for survival. In these dumps, there are toxic wastes that can be fatal.

Just this week on twitter the most famous tag word was “Trafigura”, the company accused of condoning the illegal toxic dumping of a mix of petroleum residues, sulphur and caustic soda that in August 2006 led to the death of 12 people and more than 100,000 Ivorians seeking medical treatment.

According to the Basel Action Network (BAN), a disproportionate burden of toxic waste, dangerous products and polluting technologies are currently being exported from rich industrialised countries to poorer developing countries.

And mass-scale instances of toxic waste poisoning such as that in Ivory Coast is not unique. In March 2008, hundreds of people in Mombasa complained of illness after a consignment of leaking chemical containers were dumped in Kipevu near the port. The symptoms experienced by the residents of the nearby slum were eerily similar to those who suffered from the toxic slops distributed in 18 dumping sites around Abidjan. Nausea, miscarriages and diarrhoea amongst other symptoms caused many to seek treatment.

In February 2009 a joint investigation by the Independent newspaper, Sky News, and Greenpeace also exposed the story of tonnes of toxic waste collected from British municipal dumps and sent illegally to Africa in flagrant violation of UK laws to ensure that “its rapidly growing mountain of defunct televisions, computers and gadgets are disposed of safely”.

Indeed e-waste is slowly emerging as a major sort of refuse, according to Kenya’s National Environment Management Authority. From these, the scavenger entrepreneurs risk their lives collecting metals for re-sale from disused computers, televisions, VCRs, stereos, copiers, fax machines and mobile phones.

Africa is indeed an ideal dumping ground. Apart from the inability of local environmental agencies (where environmental management laws exist) to adequately police dumping of waste, corruption also allows agents to dump waste throughout cities. And unfortunately, for the Continent’s scavenger entrepreneur’s this is the only way they can make a living.

In pictures: Kenya scavengers

A recently published blog post by David Roodman titled “Kiva is not quite what it seems” has been causing quite a stir in cyber space. Not so much because of the provocative title mentioning Kiva – a pioneer and probably the best known Person to Person (P2P) micro-credit organisation; Roodman’s post also questions the real intentions why people choose to fund a micro entrepreneur from Cambodia, Kenya or Guatemala for that matter.

Roodman posits that a reason for the success of Kiva and similar internet based lending portals is because for as little as US$ 25, more people can become benefactors. Helping others has become a cheap commodity and not only the super-rich Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s can now claim the title “philanthropist”.

Similar to the P2P lending model, goods from developing countries that sell on western supermarket shelves bear stories – some of them wild. This has been largely propagated by fair trade products. However, nowadays even a pesticide sprayed beetroot from Bulawayo must carry a story. A honey product from Kenya cannot just simply be labelled “Kenyan honey”. What’s required is a long tale weaving in a tapestry of sensory words probably going along the lines of “…this honey comes from the honey bee whose hives are in Africa’s savannah plains … The scents from the eucalyptus ensure a wild …”.

Indeed, the more evocative the story about the terrain or about how poor the farmers who produced it are, the better.

This is what consumers want – a feeling that when they put a spoon of honey in their morning tea, they feel part of that savannah so alluringly described on the product label. And it is these stories that add a couple of dollars or Euro’s onto the unit retail price. On some e-commerce websites selling African “ethnic” products, 2 kgs of maize flour which is the staple food for most East and Central African countries goes for US$ 10. The same product in an upmarket supermarket in Nairobi costs less than a quarter of that price. The point is that with good marketing, consumers pay more for the “story” than the product itself.

With rampant corruption constantly being reported in Africa, an ennui among citizens of western nations has emerged. Commonly people question why donor aid is poured into large infrastructure projects such as roads and geothermal plants yet there are numerous instances of money being siphoned off by corrupt public officials in Africa. Just last week it emerged that World Bank money earmarked for free primary education in Kenya had been stolen; thus begging the question why fund such a project when if you gave an entrepreneur a bit of money they could then be empowered enough to send their children to a fee paying school?

Media stories on Africa which in most instances focus on crises’ or the potential for crisis have made people who would otherwise dip into their pockets to alleviate hunger on the Continent averse. Thus when one sees a picture of Mary from a village just outside Kampala who has a banana kiosk, the need to assist Mary overrides the need to assist Fatma in a refugee camp in Eastern Congo.

In an age where people are sponsoring small businesses’, children and even guerrillas in Rwanda, what does this all mean for entrepreneurs either seeking funding or wanting to sell their products on the export market?

In a nutshell there is a palpable and growing demand for “virtual tourism” – a state where one can experience a lifestyle from the comfort of their seat in front of a computer monitor, or perhaps when they hold the honey jar from somewhere in Africa, gently open the lid, and smell the scent of the wild.

Read “Kiva is not quite what it seems” here

As entrepreneurs facing the worst economic crisis in our lives, it is pretty difficult to keep our businesses’ afloat; let alone take the time to follow all the “reform” talk going on around us.

This week alone, Kenya proved that it did not have the political goodwill to try the perpetrators of 2008’s post election violence and even mediator Kofi Annan is in town to assess the implementation of Agenda 4 of the Accord.

Another development this week is the publishing of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s Index on Governance. The word “governance” the way it is bandied about seems to be akin to the word “impunity” which doesn’t seem to have a standard definition. To us business people, governance comes in the form of having public services such as a steady supply of electricity and water. It is also important when it comes to that monster we call “corruption”. In essence, good governance translates into fewer indirect costs.

According to the website, “the Ibrahim Index measures the delivery of public goods and services to citizens by government and non-state actors … using indicators across four main pillars: Safety and Rule of Law; Participation and Human Rights; Sustainable Economic Opportunity; and Human Development”.

So what does the Ibrahim Index tell us about the effect of (good) governance on business? In a nutshell the following:

• Good governance ensures our personal security.
• Human rights are not divisible from business competitiveness.
• Social unrest is not good for business.
• Judicial independence and the strength of the judicial process are important for business.
• Transparency, accountability as well as corruption in the public sector adversely affect business.
• Countries scoring high on the Index have a superior quality of infrastructure coupled with the provision of reliable utilities.
• Economic policies that promote sustainable business are vital.
• Rural provision of public goods are essential for growth.