A Bronze fund cannot build a Gold economy

Kenya's National Infrastructure Fund is credible and its policy logic is sound. It also scored 53 out of 100, and the gap between those two statements is the whole argument.

On 9 March 2026, the National Infrastructure Fund Act was signed into law at State House Nairobi. By that evening we had completed the first independent evaluation of the Fund. We did not wait for an invitation, because a fund of this consequence should not have its design strengths and weaknesses argued inside government memos alone.

The verdict was not a rejection. The Fund is credible, the policy logic is sound, and the governance architecture, though imperfect, carries more safeguards than most comparable funds launched on the continent at this stage. Kenya built at an unprecedented pace between 2013 and 2025 and paid for it largely through external borrowing. The Fund replaces that borrowing model with an investment portfolio model, pooling privatisation proceeds, pension capital, development finance and climate finance into a professionally managed vehicle. That is a serious response to a real constraint.

The verdict was also 53 out of 100. A Bronze score describes a vehicle that works and leaks at the same time, and the leaks matter more when the vehicle is carrying a KSh 5 trillion decade target against public debt at 67.8 per cent of GDP and a debt-service-to-revenue ratio of 62.6 per cent. Over KSh 62 of every KSh 100 collected exits as repayment before it reaches a hospital, a school or a road.

What the debate did not have, and what the evaluation attached, is a practical architecture for tracking Social Return on Investment across the Fund's first decade, together with a scenario analysis of what the return looks like if the recommendations go unaddressed. Naming a design gap in year one is cheap. Discovering it in year seven is not.