In Kenya, the new National Infrastructure Fund is intended to attract private and non-traditional capital for infrastructure projects of national importance. At the same time, commercial attractiveness should not be the sole criterion for selecting them, civil and infrastructure engineer Olivia Lavisa wrote in a column for Nation Kenya.
According to her, the fund’s initial base amounts to about 340 billion Kenyan shillings. The proposed investment policy provides for attracting substantial private financing and sufficient project profitability. However, Lavisa warns that a project may be financially viable, meet technical requirements and interest investors, yet fail to solve the problem people face.
Transport in Nairobi
As an example, the author cites Nairobi’s transport system. Kenya has already invested significant funds in expanding and improving the urban road network, and the Nairobi–Thika Highway has substantially improved connectivity. However, a successful road project alone does not mean that the mobility problem has been solved, Lavisa notes.
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According to the World Bank’s estimate, more than 80% of trips in Nairobi involve walking as a primary or supplementary mode of travel. At the same time, people travelling on foot and by matatu can reach less than 8% of jobs within 60 minutes. Traffic congestion in the Nairobi metropolitan area, according to estimates cited in the column, costs the economy about $1 billion a year.
Assessing needs and alternatives
In the engineer’s view, mobility depends not only on road capacity, but also on access to roads, public transport connections between different parts of the city, pedestrians’ interaction with the road network, and the location of housing and jobs. She believes that before allocating funds, it is necessary to define the problem, test assumptions, consider alternative solutions and assess an asset’s entire life cycle, rather than only its construction stage.
Lavisa also noted that East Africa needs approximately $42 billion in infrastructure investment annually by 2040 to narrow the gap with comparable regions. This corresponds to about 8.6% of the region’s GDP in 2024. Therefore, not only the volume of mobilized capital is important, but also decisions on how it is used, the author emphasizes.
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