Degrees going paperless?

Hi 👋🏽 It's Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street

As we start the week, the government plans to phase out paper degrees and replace them with verifiable digital credentials, built with help from the Tony Blair Institute.

Brian Nzomo writes…

Officials say the move will fight academic fraud and restore faith in universities long plagued by fake certificates and outdated courses. The technology, which uses cryptographic verification, will allow employers to instantly confirm a graduate’s credentials, but it also echoes Tony Blair’s broader push for digital IDs, a project that has stirred fierce privacy debates in Britain.

While Nairobi insists its version is about efficiency, not surveillance, the partnership has revived old concerns about centralizing sensitive personal data.

Meanwhile, Kenya’s universities face their own reckoning: mounting debts, overcrowded classes, and a regulator stretched thin. Digitization may clean up the paperwork, but it won’t fix the classrooms.

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Your Opinion 

Safaricom And the Ethiopian Paradox

By Harry Njuguna

Safaricom’s bold gamble in Ethiopia has rewritten the rules of the country’s telecom market but at a staggering cost.

Prices are down, access is up, and millions have come online, yet the company’s books are deep in the red. The World Bank says the operator’s expansion, though transformative, is trapped in an uneven field where its state-backed rival still owns the towers and the cables.

Ethiopia’s weak currency and half-finished liberalization regime have turned every new customer into a loss-making one. The question now is whether reform will come fast enough to save the Kenyan pioneer from its own success.

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Stolen Medical Aid : From Kenya to Guyana

By Brian Nzomo

A U.S. indictment has pulled Kenya’s troubled medical supply agency back into the spotlight, alleging that American-funded HIV test kits meant for clinics were stolen and sold overseas.

The case, centered on businessman Eric Ndung’u Mwangi and his company, ties a Nairobi warehouse to a Guyanese distributor in a transatlantic chain of fraud. It marks a new layer of scrutiny for KEMSA, long accused of graft and mismanagement despite billions in donor support. For Washington, it’s a test of accountability in foreign aid, even as the Trump regime doubles down on its America-first crusade.

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The Consolidation of Insurance Giants 

By Harry Njuguna

Two years after Sanlam and Allianz announced their continental marriage, the union has finally taken legal form in Kenya.

The insurance regulator has signed off on the transfer of Sanlam’s general business, worth just over KSh 820 million, to Jubilee Allianz, completing one of the largest portfolio consolidations in the market’s history. Behind the paperwork lies a broader ambition: to fuse two sprawling empires into a single African powerhouse.

Read more here »»»»»

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