Businesses upbeat ahead of Obama’s Kenyan visit

US President Barrack Obama

Whenever African politicians visit their home towns after winning an election or a top government appointment, they are expected to bring back some goodies and share with their people.

US President Barrack Obama is technically not an African politician, for his stature and the office he holds transcend the African continent and his home country, Kenya.

However, even as Kenya continues to prepare for the first ever visit from a sitting US president for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at the KICC Nairobi later this month, there is a strong undertone that Obama will have ‘something’ for the country’s business community.

Industrialist Chris Kirubi says Kenya has a chance to showcase its best side to the thousands of entrepreneurs, Government ministers and The Bretton Woods officials who will be gracing the event. “This is an opportunity for Kenya to put its best foot forward and show that we are the best in Africa and that there are a lot of investment opportunities in this country,” he states.

“I hope that the media will start going into opportunities available in the counties, the safety of manufacturing and merits of producing here at home,” he said.

Business start-ups

Kenya Commercial Bank Chief Executive Joshua Oigara said the conditions of starting a business in the country are the best in Africa and believes the summit is the best opportunity yet to have young people take their ideas for enterprise to actualisation. “We need to invest in creating endorsements for our preparedness,” he states. “The Global Entrepreneurship Summit is about young people creating an opportunity to excel. The younger generations are unbound. They have no limits.”

Morocco hosted the fifth edition of the summit last November and got a pledge for a $50 million (Sh5 billion) public-private training programme, an entrepreneurs’ training academy for North Africa and $7 million (Sh700 million) for a cold storage facility.

This was besides the millions of dollars in direct and indirect revenue that went to the country’s tourism industry and numerous other intra and inter-government and private sector deals signed during and after the event.

This year, Obama will open the summit with President Uhuru Kenyatta and the business community, particularly small and medium entrepreneurs are hopeful that Kenya will close the summit with long-term dividends.

The Kenyan start-up community leads in sub-Saharan Africa and the Government has taken note of this, following through with its own initiative to complement what the largely private sector-led incubation labs and co-working spaces are doing.

Early this year, President Uhuru Kenyatta launched Enterprise Kenya, a mix of private and public sector efforts to see the hundreds of ideas and start-ups present in the country take flight, become fully scalable companies that can create employment and value.