Value of diaspora in economic diplomacy

Diaspora Affairs PS Ms Roseline Kathure Njogu, the dispora has been hailed as a key source of revenue for the country . [Courtesy Ministry Foreign Affairs]

In July, Foreign Affairs PS Korir Sing'Oei landed in Australia under the country's Special Visitors Programme, an invitation Canberra reserves for leaders it considers strategic partners. It was a small trip in the grand scheme of Kenya's foreign policy calendar, but it was also a useful case study in what economic diplomacy looks like when it is done with intent. Over the course of the visit, Sing'Oei sat down with Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, met the leadership of Austrade, held a lecture on reforming the global financial system, and convened a business roundtable hosted by Austrade CEO Dr Paul Grimes. He also stopped at the University of Technology Sydney to talk higher education partnerships and found time to rally support for Kenya's candidates to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

At a reception hosted by High Commissioner Dr Wilson Kogo, he met the Kenyan community in Sydney, a community that officials estimate at around 35,000 people. That is a lot of ground to cover in one trip, and it is worth being generous about it. This was diplomacy that tried to produce something rather than a photo opportunity Here is the honest part. A good visit is not the same thing as a strategy. Kenya has, for years, treated economic diplomacy as something that happens episodically, tied to a minister's calendar or a state visit, rather than as standing infrastructure. Compare this to how South Korea or India run their diaspora and trade offices abroad: dedicated economic desks, regular data on remittance and investment flows, formal mechanisms that outlive any single official's term. Kenya's missions have historically been under resourced for this kind of work, and a great deal of the follow up after a high-level visit depends on goodwill rather than a functioning pipeline.

The result is that moments like the Sydney trip risk becoming isolated wins instead of the first step in something durable. Kenya has real assets to offer: a growing tech sector, agricultural expertise, a young workforce. But converting interest expressed in a roundtable into an actual investment, an actual scholarship pipeline, or an actual trade corridor takes institutional follow through that does not always exist yet. This is where the argument usually goes wrong. Diaspora engagement gets treated as a cultural nicety, a dinner, a WhatsApp group, a cultural night. It should be read instead as the actual delivery mechanism for economic diplomacy. Consider the numbers. Kenyan diaspora remittances have for several years now outpaced tea, coffee and horticulture combined as a source of foreign exchange.

That is not sentiment, that is capital, arriving monthly, from people who already understand both markets. A Kenyan engineer in Perth or a nurse in Melbourne is not just a source of school fees back home. They are a person who can vouch for Kenyan talent to an Australian employer, point a mining company toward opportunities in Turkana, or advise a Kenyan startup on how to structure itself for an Australian investor. Sing'Oei's own description of the Sydney diaspora as "a vital bridge for commercial ties, investment, and knowledge transfer is a precise description of what diaspora networks do in practice, in Israel, in India, in the Philippines, wherever governments have taken the trouble to organise them. This is precisely the gap the Kenya Australia Summit, set for 11 September in Sydney, is trying to close.

Billed as Australia's first diaspora led Kenya Australia summit, it brings together government, business, universities and the diaspora under one roof, not as a cultural showcase but as a working platform for trade and investment conversations. It is the kind of structure that turns a PS's roundtable into something with continuity: a place where a mining executive who met Sing'Oei in July can sit across from a Kenyan investment promotion officer in September, with diaspora professionals in the room translating the opportunity in both directions. If Kenya wants economic diplomacy to be more than a series of good trips, three things would help.

First, missions abroad need small but real economic desks, staff whose job is specifically trade and diaspora investment, not an add on to consular duties. Second, diaspora professional networks need to be mapped and resourced as a matter of policy, the way Austrade treats its own business networks, rather than left to organic community effort. Third, momentum from visits like Sing'Oei's needs a scheduled second act, follow up meetings, an actual investment desk that Australian businesses can call, rather than relying on the next ministerial trip to keep the conversation alive. None of this diminishes what the July visit achieved. It is, if anything, an argument for building around it. Kenya has shown, through this trip and through similar diaspora forums in Prague and elsewhere, that it understands the value of engaging its people abroad. The next move is turning that instinct into infrastructure, so that a summit in Sydney in September is not a oneoff event but the second data point in a pattern Kenya intends to repeat, with its diaspora doing a lot of the heaviest lifting. The writer is the chair of the Kenyan Community in NSW, Australia, [e-mail]