The Student Debt System Under Strain

Good evening. It’s Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street.

Here are our day’s stories…

Student Loans Keep Surging, But the Foundation is Shaky…

By Brian Nzomo

Kenya is attempting one of the most ambitious expansions of higher education in its history while steadily retreating from paying for it. HELB loan disbursements surged to a record KSh62 billion this year as the government’s Student-centred Funding Model pushed more students into universities and colleges, yet Treasury support to the loan board declined, repayments weakened sharply, and defaults swelled into a KSh90 billion bad-loan crisis. The contradiction runs through the entire system: the state is aggressively promoting technical education as the backbone of its industrialisation strategy even as funding to TVET students has fallen by almost half, leaving tens of thousands of trainees without support despite rising enrolment. What emerges from the data is not simply a funding gap, but a deeper structural shift in which Kenya is increasingly financing mass higher education through expanding household debt in an economy still unable to generate enough stable formal employment for graduates to repay what they owe.

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Kenya is Betting on Green Hydrogen Energy Projects

By Fred Obura

Kenya is trying to position itself at the centre of a global industry that barely exists at commercial scale today. The approval of 15 green hydrogen projects signals a broader ambition to convert the country’s vast renewable energy resources into export industries built around green ammonia, sustainable aviation fuel, and low-carbon manufacturing. But the push comes as enthusiasm around hydrogen is cooling globally under the weight of high costs, financing problems and uncertainty over future demand. The contradiction is that Kenya is moving aggressively into a sector that richer economies themselves are still struggling to make commercially viable.

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35 Things The Economic Survey 2026 Tells Us About Kenya (That Most People Will Miss)

By Prince Muraguri

Kenya’s economy is becoming increasingly difficult to describe with a single narrative because the macroeconomic data and the lived reality are moving in opposite directions. Inflation has cooled, the shilling has strengthened, the stock market has surged and the fiscal deficit has narrowed, yet real wages remain below 2009 levels, manufacturing is weakening, and more than five out of six workers still survive in the informal economy. The Economic Survey 2026 ultimately describes a country that has stabilised financially without fully restoring the mechanisms that translate growth into broad prosperity, particularly through formal employment, industrial expansion and affordable credit. The contradiction running through the entire report is that Kenya’s economic indicators increasingly resemble those of a stabilising middle-income economy while its labour market still behaves like that of a structurally fragile low-income one.

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