Kenya

Kenya is East Africa's commercial, financial and technology anchor — a $124.5bn economy of ~57.5m people that functions as the gateway to the wider East African Community. Its thesis rests on a globally unrivalled mobile-money infrastructure (M-Pesa moved value exceeding annual GDP), a renewable-heavy grid drawing green-powered data infrastructure, and a startup ecosystem that captured the largest share of African venture capital in 2025.

The dominant risk is fiscal, and it is acute. The FY2024/25 deficit widened to 5.9% of GDP, public debt sits at 68.8%, and Kenya remains at high risk of debt distress — the legacy of the June 2024 Finance Bill protests, after which the IMF programme was terminated early and World Bank budget support was suspended, forcing Nairobi into costly Eurobond borrowing.

The distinctiveness is that Kenya's private-sector dynamism is decoupling from sovereign weakness: even as the IMF programme collapsed, startups raised $984m in 2025 and global hyperscalers committed billion-dollar geothermal data-centre investments. The opportunity sits in dollar-generating, infrastructure-light verticals that can underwrite their own returns independent of the fiscal cycle.