Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, friends and visitors from across the East African community and beyond, I join the governor of Nairobi in welcoming all of you to Kenya and of course to the city of Nairobi.
Just a bit of geography, I think the governors forgot. Just behind us here, about a kilometer or so, is the Nairobi National Park, and the Nairobi National Park is home to wildlife including lions, elephants, and many others. Don't be surprised that when you're walking in the streets, you might find a lion who may have escaped from the park. I just want to warn you to be careful.
But I'm honored to welcome you to Nairobi, the heart of our region's enterprise, for the 25th East African Community Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Trade Fair. This gathering is a compelling validation of micro, small, and medium enterprises that remain the pillar of our economies. They are the engines of job creation, drivers of innovation, and anchors of industrial growth and the driving force of our shared prosperity, not just as a region but also as a continent.
Today we pay tribute to the visionary leadership of the three distinguished patriots of our region: President Yoweri Museveni of the Republic of Uganda, the late President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, and the late President Benjamin Mkapa, the third president of the United Republic of Tanzania, who 25 years ago in Arusha reinvigorated the East African community through the signing of its founding treaty.
Alongside this historic milestone, then the Jumuiya ya Biashara ya Afrika Mashariki exhibition was launched, showcasing the ingenuity of the MSMEs in our partner states. Their Excellencies resolved then that this exhibition would be held annually on a rotational basis to deepen socio-economic integration, expand market access for all our products, and narrow technological and knowledge disparities across the East African community nations.
A quarter century later today, the East African community has blossomed into a powerful bloc of eight partner states representing over 300 million citizens and making East Africa one of the world's most dynamic and rapidly emerging markets.
This trade fair, and I have gone through the stalls and spoken to many entrepreneurs here, and the excitement, the optimism that I saw in their enterprises and the partnerships that are being established and the friendship that is building within them, is a great encouragement that it was right 25 years ago, it is right today.
This trade fair has equally evolved and is no longer merely a marketplace for goods, but a strategic platform for skills exchange, innovation, partnership, and structured dialogue aimed at dismantling barriers of trade and movement of people. As we commemorate this silver jubilee, we are mindful of the defining forces shaping our world today: a rapidly growing population in all our countries, the rise of the youthful generation, accelerated technological disruption, climate change pressures, unemployment, and of course, shifting geopolitical realignments that continue to reshape global supply chains.
These forces carry challenges, but even better, they carry greater opportunities if we harness them. Our young population in particular positions the region to lead through digital innovation, creative enterprise, and a thriving knowledge economy. I see it every day in Kenya and looking at the East African entrepreneurs that are here. I see it in their energy, in their passion, and in the partnerships they are building with their colleagues across the region.
I am encouraged that the conversations shaping the trade fair are ambitious, forward-looking, and action-oriented, giving priority to digital transformation, equitable access to finance, expanded markets, and sustainable green enterprises to support MSMEs to grow, to scale up, and to generate wealth.
In Kenya, the bottom-up economic transformation agenda places MSMEs at the core of our development framework alongside agriculture, universal healthcare, affordable housing, and the digital and creative economy. We have prioritized strategic high-growth value chains including leather, dairy, textiles and apparel, edible oils, and rice. Others are tea, building and construction, the blue economy, natural resources, and mining.
Our choice of subsidy on agricultural production rather than consumption was initially met with skepticism, but the results speak for themselves today. Our national yields of tea, of coffee, of sugarcane, of maize, of rice, of wheat have all increased and in some cases doubled. Those who doubted this two years ago today confirm that it was the right strategy to subsidize production and not consumption.
To expand financial inclusion, we launched the Financial Inclusion Fund, popularly known as the Hustler Fund, which has so far disbursed 80 billion Kenya shillings to many Kenyans since November 2022. The fund has provided dignified credit to those previously excluded from formal lending. And let me say this about the Hustler Fund: the primary approach that we had on micro and small enterprises.
In 2022, we had 7 million Kenyans, 3 million of them being micro-enterprises, who were blacklisted in our credit reference bureaus and they could not undertake any business. They could not open an account. They were completely locked out of the economic space. We took the decision that we are going to change how credit is accessed in Kenya. We also took the firm position and negotiated with credit reference bureaus and we redeemed 7 million Kenyans who were blacklisted and gave them a second chance.
Today I am very confident and happy that the 7 million Kenyans have since transformed. Today we have 2 million Kenyans who borrow religiously from the Hustler Fund. Today we have close to 800,000 entrepreneurs, small businesses that today borrow money on our bridge finance as part of the Hustler Fund, and they are doing this without the benefit of any collateral.
The biggest problem we had in Kenya was that for you to access credit—5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 100,000, 150,000—you either had to have a logbook of some motorcycle or car, or you had some title to some piece of land, or you had a payslip. Today, an ordinary citizen without a payslip, without a title deed, without a logbook can access up to 150,000 shillings on the Hustler Fund. The only collateral being their credit record that they are decent people and they can pay. It has expanded the collateral space. Today, the collateral space includes your credit rating, which comes as a result of you being able to pay your debts.
Through digital lending, borrowers are building credit histories that have crystallized into credit scores, improving visibility to lenders, reducing risk perceptions, and expanding financial opportunity to many.
I am very proud, and I think once the story of the Hustler Fund will be written, there will be so many people who will have a story to tell that had been locked out of the credit space and they couldn't access any money or any credit. Today, people who were paying up to 100% for credit, today they are paying 8%.
I remember when we discussed and we said we are going to peg this on 8%, one very rich person—I don't want to mention their names—told me this will be unsustainable, it will not work. I am looking for him now so that I can tell him it is working, because this is now 3 years down the road and we are making strides in the right direction.
Not only are credit ratings of people have been restored, not only are people borrowing on a daily basis, but the credit limits are also increasing and we are making more and more Kenyans access credit. We are now advancing efforts to securitize this credit score, recognizing it as collateral to unlock financing for millions, especially young people and women who lack traditional assets such as property or formal payslips.
As I have said, to strengthen market access, Kenya is establishing county aggregation and industrial parks in all the 47 counties to support agro-processing, consolidate local value chains, and expand commercial reach for our micro, small, and medium enterprises. The governor of Nairobi keeps reminding me that the county aggregation and industrial park for Nairobi will not be selling any agricultural products. They will instead be manufacturing stuff for those in the city, and therefore this is tailored for different value chains in different counties in different parts of the country.
The ultimate goal is that we need to assist small enterprises who may not have money to rent their own space to use spaces that we have already built and to also share some of the equipment that they use. We will have common user facilities where you don't have to own a certain machine. Maybe it is expensive, but we will have machines available and they will be shared and everybody can have access to these facilities and use it to improve their businesses.
Looking at the enterprises that are exhibitors in this fair, many of them require not so much capital. They just need to enhance the finesse of what they are producing. We just need to support them the last mile. That last mile is what common user facilities can do. I say so because I have seen it in Karachuonyo. We are going to be replicating Karachuonyo in all our county aggregation industrial parks so that more and more enterprises can have access to credit and to tools that they can use to enhance the value of the products that they are producing.
Three fundamental things are important. I said earlier access to credit, and we have moved several steps in making sure that we clear the pathway for access to credit. Number two, we must also have targeted grants. We are in the process of rolling out the NEOTA program. The NEOTA program is going to have targeted grants to enterprises that are being run by young people between the ages of 18 and 29 and people living with disability ages up to 35.
We are looking for 110,000 such small enterprises and we are going to give them a grant of 50,000 shillings each. We started that process last week. I just want to announce that the rest of the process is underway. I'm informed by Waziri Oparanya and his team that they will be training the rest of the country from this Friday through early next week. And so from next week we will be releasing another 4.4 billion Kenya shillings to the rest of the people who will have been trained and identified.
In the city of Nairobi alone, Governor Sakaja and your team, in the city of Nairobi alone we will be looking for 6,000 enterprises, small business people, 6,000 of them, and we are going to give them 300 million shillings. So I'm looking for that moment and I hope Jalango and your team from Nairobi you organize yourselves because we want to do this to raise the capital for the small entrepreneurs and to scale them up so that they can run their businesses.
We will be identifying and we want a level of equity. 50% of the beneficiaries must be women. It can only be 50%, no less. It can be more women, but minimum 50% women because women are very good business people and they have already demonstrated even in the areas that we have already identified. And I am maybe biased because I have more girls in my house than boys, but that is the reality of what it is.
And so we will be pushing this. I also want to say that under the same program, the NEOTA program, we want to also create opportunities because part of growing the MSMEs is what I said: access to credit, targeted grants, and we are also supporting them to do business. Under this same program, we will be identifying 600,000 small entrepreneurs and we want to support them with capacity building so that they can do business with government both at the county and at the national level.
We have government procurement that has been ring-fenced for young people, for women, for people living with disability, all the way in the region of 220 billion. That is the amount of business that is available to this category. They are not accessing it because we haven't built the capacity for them to understand how to do it, to know how to work with the government bureaucracy and system, and we are going under this program to work with them so that we can bring them into the space. And I am very confident that these are people who can actually appropriate that space and do that business.
Why do I say so? We did a targeted procurement for our housing program and the Jua Kali sector came through. The Jua Kali sector, we have now given them contracts of close to 15 billion Kenya shillings. You know, the people making doors, the people making windows, the people making hinges, and these are people on Gong Road, these are people in Kamukunji, these are very small enterprises. And I mean, there was almost a disconnect, you know, if you talk about 15 billion and Jua Kali in the same sentence, it doesn't look correct. Because 15 billion is supposed to be mega enterprises. But those are the possibilities when we are targeted about the people we are looking for. And I must confess that the Jua Kali sector have proven that they can do what big enterprises can do. Maybe they can do it even better.
And therefore I am very confident that as we build the capacities of our small entrepreneurs, either by making sure they have access to credit, or making sure that they have access to grants, or we facilitate them with capacity for them to participate in government procurement and government enterprises, we will certainly be doing our bottom-up program because that is what it is.
So again, I will be looking forward to working with all the stakeholders in that space. We want to disburse that 4.4 billion shillings in the next 10 days. So there will be quite some support around for enterprises.
We have also commissioned, as you know, new special economic zones in Busia, in Eldoret, in Nakuru, in Athi River, in Thika, of course in Sagana, and in Dongo Kundu. And our plan there is to attract greater foreign direct investment, stimulate industrialization, and expand regional trade.
Our affordable housing program, as I have said, has gone beyond transforming urban areas and has created jobs now standing at close to 600,000 and ring-fenced billions of shillings for the Jua Kali sector in the manufacturing sector. And to accelerate digital commerce, we are building 100,000 km of digital superhighway, expanding connectivity and enabling commerce to thrive.
Public Wi-Fi will reach markets in villages and digital hubs which we will establish in at least each of the 1,450 wards, including those in Nairobi and elsewhere. And we are already 30% into that program. We have already done 30,000 kilometers of digital superhighway.
We have also, as you know, digitized government services. 23,000 government services today are available on eCitizen, and we have streamlined access, reduced costs, eliminated inefficiencies, and simplified business registration to spur entrepreneurship. You heard the governor of Nairobi saying how it is easy today to register your company, look for your license from the comfort of your phone wherever you may be.
We are investing in the entrepreneurs of tomorrow in the process that I have explained to you under our program. We are looking at tapping into regional markets, but as a region we must elevate this trade fair by fully leveraging the continental framework including the African Continental Free Trade Area. I'm very happy that our friend Wamkele Mene, the Secretary General of AfCFTA, was here to share with us the perspectives from a continental platform.
I am very confident that the AfCFTA protocol on women and youth in trade must be fully domesticated across partner states to ensure inclusion in economic opportunity. I commend the insight shared yesterday by AfCFTA Secretary General.
Today, in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, we also celebrate the establishment of the International Trade Centre regional hub here in Nairobi. We express our very, very sincere gratitude to the Executive Director Pamela Coke-Hamilton and the larger United Nations system for this gesture. This milestone is not Kenya's alone. It belongs to East Africa, bringing global markets within closer reach to our producers and our value chains.
As I conclude, I wish to reaffirm the commitment of the East African heads of state to resolve persistent non-tariff barriers that continue to constrain border trade. And this trade fair offers an invaluable opportunity to elevate these realities ahead of the upcoming East African Community Summit.
I want to commend all the exhibitors who have come to Kenya, all the Kenyans who are participating in this trade fair, and all the friends who have come to support us and work with us and work with our micro, small, and medium enterprises, all the agencies that are part of the micro, small, and medium enterprise system. You have our commitment, you have our support. We have a whole-of-government interest in making sure that we elevate this sector because it is the sector that drives our economy. It is the sector that creates jobs. It is the sector that drives our production, and you have our support in every way. Thank you very much and thank you again for your kind attention.
