What do you look forward to doing in Kakuma/Kalobeyei? How do you see your business growing in the next 5 years? What challenges have you had to overcome?

With KKCF funding, AEC Kenya seeks to have additional market insights, a larger investment portfolio, and double-bottom-line impact to demonstrate to investors the commercial viability of lending to refugees.

Based on our projections, with KKCF funding, 25% of AEC Kenya’s operating costs will be fully sustained with earned revenue by 2024, reaching 60% earned revenue by 2026.

Here below are some challenges we have faced to date:

– In general, weathering the COVID-19 pandemic and the most recent camp closure announcements by Government of Kenya have been the biggest barriers to achieving our milestones as initially planned. However, we see continued recovery and a lessening of restrictions, hence better results compared to the past two years, which creates hope as we carefully watch the trends and pivot accordingly.
– Additionally, some participants who had taken part in other business development programmes with less stringent standards for participation and loan/investment repayments, dropped out of AEC’s cohorts when they learned there would be no immediate financial gain.