A parliamentary committee wants a near-total rewrite of the investment rules governing Kenya’s new National Infrastructure Fund, arguing the current framework leaves too many gaps before the fund begins making major investment decisions.
The National Assembly’s Finance and National Planning Committee, chaired by Molo MP Francis Kuria Kimani, has recommended sweeping amendments to Sessional Paper No. 7 of 2026, which sets out the National Infrastructure Fund Investment Policy. The committee says the paper, as it stands, does not give the fund’s board clear enough guidance on how to select and finance projects that are meant to be both commercially viable and of national importance.
The fund was established earlier this year under the National Infrastructure Fund Act, seeded with roughly Sh340 billion raised largely from the sale of government shares in firms including Kenya Pipeline Company and Safaricom. The long-term ambition is to grow that pool to as much as Sh5 trillion by drawing in private investors, easing the pressure on public borrowing to finance big-ticket infrastructure such as highways, railways, airports, seaports, power systems and water reservoirs.
Under the existing policy, the fund already faces some guardrails: caps on how much can go into any single project or sector, a requirement that projects attract a meaningful share of private debt financing, a minimum expected return on the fund’s own equity stakes, and a rule barring the board from borrowing against the fund’s balance sheet.
Even so, the committee argues that more detailed procedures on project selection, risk management and reporting are needed before the fund makes its first major disbursements, to protect public money and give private co-investors confidence to come on board.
Sessional Paper No. 7 had already been approved by the National Assembly as the fund’s official investment policy, but the committee’s latest recommendations effectively send it back for revision. Once the amendments are debated and adopted, the updated policy will govern how the Sh340 billion in seed capital, and any private money that follows, is deployed on projects designed to pay for themselves over time.
Officials at the fund say they are already screening potential projects to check whether they meet the required commercial standards, even as the policy underpinning those decisions is reworked.