In recent years, the prospects of Kenya's tourism industry have been clouded by a perfect storm of misfortunes - insecurity, growing global competition, and unsustainable tourism development. It is in this context that the potential and actual contribution of the tourism sector to the country's...

In 2004, a landmark study showed that an inexpensive medication to treat parasitic worms could improve health and school attendance for millions of children in many developing countries. Eleven years later, a headline in the Guardian reported that this treatment, deworming, had been "debunked."...

In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a...

Worldwide, 250 million children under five (43 percent) are not meeting their developmental potential because they lack adequate nutrition and cognitive stimulation in early childhood. Several parent support programs have shown significant benefits for children's development, but the programs...

This paper proposes a framework that examines three levels of access to infrastructure-nominal, effective, and quality-adjusted access. Most conventional indicators measure nominal access-whether a household has physical access to a service in or near the house. By contrast, effective access...

Two successive waves of reform have fundamentally altered the structure and organization of Kenya's vibrant power sector, which boasts a tradition of strong technical and commercial performance. In the first wave-beginning in 1996 and largely donor-driven-policy and regulatory functions were...

Access to school has risen dramatically in recent decades, with large gains from reducing costs. Few studies report long-term impacts, however. This paper reports the impact of an educational intervention that reduced out-of-pocket schooling costs for children in poor communities in Kenya by...

Interest rate caps can have far-reaching consequences on the composition and maturity of commercial bank loans and deposits. This paper carefully documents these impacts on the formal financial sector in Kenya after the recent interest rate caps of 2016. Using bank-level panel data from before...

Ceilings on lending rates remain a widely used policy tool that is intended to lower the overall cost of credit or protect consumers from exorbitant rates. Interest rate caps come in many forms and scopes and, according to their rationale, ceilings can affect a small segment or the overall...

This paper discusses the landscape for private equity and venture capital financing in Kenya. It provides an overview of the private equity and venture capital market in the country, describing key players, including funds, fund managers, investors, and public sector entities. The paper provides...