Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 863 of 863 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
Kenya's central bank let a phone company build a national payments system in 2007 and supervised it into ubiquity, and by June 2026 Kenya had 94.2 million registered mobile money accounts and 572,104 agents, in a population of about 55 million.
The central bank issued a letter of no objection instead of demanding a banking licence, set conditions on trust accounts holding customer float, and wrote the e-money regulations after the system worked, legalising what it had learned rather than licensing what it could imagine.
Preconditions
A regulator senior enough to carry the risk of saying yes
A mobile operator with national agent reach and its own fraud controls
A banking sector too small in reach to block the entrant
Where else it has been used: Mobile money spread across Africa and South Asia, but mostly where regulators copied the permissive sequencing. Where banking law was applied first, including in some of Kenya's neighbours for years, adoption stalled.
Limits: The delivery was Safaricom's, a majority-private company, so the record bears on public-private collaboration only through what the state did: permit, then supervise, then regulate interoperability. Registered accounts overstate people, since many Kenyans hold several, and account counts say nothing about fees, which are materially higher than card rails elsewhere. A single dominant operator is also a concentration the indicator's construct does not reward.
Kenya's state adult education programme, run since the 1978 presidential literacy decree through adult education centres in every county, enrolled 330,340 learners in 2014 and 165,552 in 2025, after a low of 125,402 in 2023, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
The presidency decreed a national literacy programme, and the education ministry, and later a social protection directorate, ran it through state-paid instructors in community adult education centres in every district. Enrolment fell by half over a decade as the function moved between ministries and county returns degraded.
Preconditions
A large adult population that had missed primary school
A ministry department with paid instructors at district level
A political mandate that framed literacy as a national campaign rather than a welfare service
Limits: The metric is a head count of learners in adult education centres, mostly basic literacy, not the share of adults in formal or non-formal education and training that the indicator defines: 165,552 is well under one percent of Kenya's adult population, and the count leaves out TVET, university, employer training and private courses entirely. The peak is only the highest year in the series KNBS publishes from 2010 onwards (252,553 in 2010, 330,340 in 2014). The 1980s literacy campaign almost certainly enrolled more, so the true loss from the programme's peak is understated, not overstated. The series is administrative and badly maintained. KNBS revised 2015 from 246,215 (Economic Survey 2016) to 306,228 (Economic Survey 2018). The 2025 figure is provisional. Several counties report identical numbers in consecutive years (Garissa 3,256 in all four years 2022 to 2025, and Samburu and Laikipia repeated), which points to carried-forward returns. One county, Nairobi, accounts for most of the 2025 rebound, rising from 13,194 to 34,506 in one year. Falling enrolment can partly reflect success, since younger cohorts went through universal primary schooling and need less remedial literacy, so the decline is evidence of lost provision only alongside the fact that the programme was reorganised across ministries and is now run by a social protection directorate. The 1978 start year is the presidential decree reported by the state news agency, not a documented first enrolment. The 2014 peak was itself revised: Economic Survey 2015 published 300,462 (provisional) and Economic Survey 2017 restated it as 330,340; against the earlier figure the fall to 2025 is about 45 percent rather than half.
Kenya's Capital Markets Authority opened a regulatory sandbox under a 2019 policy guidance note and by January 2024 had let 11 firms exit it after live testing, with new admissions continuing into January 2025.
The Capital Markets Authority issued a policy guidance note that let fintech firms and incumbents test capital markets products with real customers under relaxed rules, then used each exit as the moment to grant a licence or approval under the Capital Markets Act.
Preconditions
A regulator with statutory power to grant no-objections and tailored approvals
A domestic fintech sector already built on mobile money rails
Peer regulators abroad, through the Global Financial Innovation Network, to copy procedures from
Limits: This is one regulator's sandbox for capital markets products only. It says nothing about the Central Bank of Kenya, the Communications Authority or any other regulator, so it covers little of the breadth the indicator asks for. The count is the regulator's own, taken from a press release, and the CMA publishes no running register. The 11 exits are cumulative over almost five years, a small number that says nothing about what the exiting products did in the market. 'Successful exit' is the CMA's own description. The figure is from January 2024, and no later official total was found.
Kenya's National Drought Management Authority expanded the shock-responsive Hunger Safety Net Programme from four to eight arid counties, enrolling 32,000 new households paid from the government's own budget by December 2024, while 100 percent of regular transfers in the original four counties were financed by the government.
The drought authority pre-registers and banks almost every household in the arid north, pays the poorest a regular transfer, and uses satellite vegetation triggers to extend payments to more registered households when drought hits, so money can move without a new targeting exercise.
Preconditions
A household registry and bank accounts set up before the shock
A trigger rule tied to an objective drought index
Contingent money ready to flow when the trigger fires, which is where Kenya's version fell short in 2021 to 2023
Where else it has been used: Ethiopia's PSNP and the Sahel adaptive safety nets use the same scalable design. The Kenyan retelling shows that the registry and trigger are the easy part: the contingent finance is what fails under fiscal stress.
Limits: The source is the lender's completion report on a project it financed, and the numbers are in the PDF (32,000 households on printed pages 22 and 35; four to eight counties on printed page 17; drought arrears on printed page 16). The headline number is regular coverage, not drought response: the report says that during the 2021 to 2023 drought the scalable emergency component ran a deficit, emergency transfers were underfinanced and delayed, and arrears were paid only later, and that planned scale-up payments in 2024/25 were not triggered. So the record shows the standing system, not a fast drought payout. HSNP covers arid and semi-arid counties, not the whole country, by design. The 2009 start year is the first HSNP phase, which ran as a donor-funded pilot before the government took it over, and is not stated in this report.
๐ฐ๐ชKenyasince 2020delivered and closedbears on Institutional responsiveness
The Central Bank of Kenya announced emergency measures on 18 and 24 March 2020 that let banks restructure loans performing on 2 March 2020, and by the end of February 2021, days before the measures expired on 2 March 2021, loans of Ksh 1.7 trillion, 57 percent of the banking sector's gross loans, had been restructured.
The central bank changed loan classification and provisioning rules by circular within a week of the first case, letting banks extend repayment, grant moratoria and waive fees on loans performing before the shock, and set a fixed expiry date after which standard classification resumed.
Preconditions
A central bank with direct supervisory authority over loan classification
Banks capitalised enough to carry restructured loans for a year
A dated cut-off (loans performing on 2 March 2020) that kept pre-existing bad loans out
Where else it has been used: Time-bound restructuring windows were used by many central banks in 2020; the fixed expiry and the published cumulative-versus-outstanding figures are the part that makes Kenya's version auditable.
Limits: The regulator is grading its own measure: the release calls it highly effective and gives no independent evaluation, and the figures are a one-page press release PDF, not a supervisory dataset. Restructuring is a forbearance rule, not new money, and restructured loans can hide losses: the share says nothing about how many restructured loans later defaulted, beyond the release's own statement that over 95 percent of the Ksh 569.3 billion still outstanding was being repaid on restructured terms. The cumulative 57 percent counts amounts, not borrowers, and includes loans restructured more than once if banks reported them so. The speed evidence is a separate CBK release: the Monetary Policy Committee statement of 29 July 2020 (https://www.centralbank.go.ke/uploads/mpc_press_release/603807985_MPC%20Press%20Release%20-%20Meeting%20of%20July%2029%202020.pdf) reports KES 844.4 billion, 29 percent of the loan book, restructured by the end of June 2020, the same release that reports the gross NPL ratio at 13.1 percent. One temporary financial-sector rule does not show how fast Kenyan public programmes change in general.
Kenya Railways began building the Standard Gauge Railway in financial year 2014/15, completed the 472 km Mombasa to Nairobi Phase I in 2017, and opened the 120 km Phase 2A to Naivasha in September 2019 against a September 2017 start and an 18-month plan, about six months late; the line hauled 7.33 million tonnes of freight in 2025.
18 months, planned construction period of sgr phase 2a (sept 2017 start, ksh 155.5 billion), against which the line opened in september 2019, about six months (a third) late, 2017. 7,332 thousand tonnes, freight hauled on the sgr, 2025. Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, Economic Survey 2018, retrieved 2026-10-01.
The move, and what it needed
The Treasury and Kenya Railways contracted a Chinese state contractor on a design-build-supply basis with Exim Bank finance, which put construction risk and speed on the contractor and left financing, land acquisition and traffic risk with the state.
Preconditions
A bilateral lender willing to finance most of the cost against sovereign guarantees
A state able to acquire a 472 km corridor of land quickly
A port whose cargo the state could steer onto rail to fill the line
Limits: No official source found publishes the outturn cost of either phase against its budget, so the record carries a cost plan (KSh 155.5 billion for Phase 2A) and no cost performance. That is the half of the construct that matters most for a Chinese-financed turnkey contract. The schedule overrun of about six months on Phase 2A, or a third of the 18-month plan, is computed: the plan is from KNBS, and the opening is from the Ministry of Roads and Transport Strategic Plan 2023-2027 draft ('completed Phase 2A ... and was launched for operation in September 2019', https://www.transport.go.ke/sites/default/files/DRAFT%20FINAL%20MINISTERIAL%20STRATEGIC%20PLAN%202023-27%20FEB%202024%20.pdf). Phase I's schedule against its plan cannot be checked from an official copy. The National Assembly's 2014 Public Investments Committee report giving a December 2016 completion date and a USD 3.804 billion contract price was found only on an NGO mirror. The parliamentary repository timed out, so neither figure is used. The railway was meant to run to Malaba and into Uganda, and the Naivasha to Malaba section remained unbuilt for years. The same ministry plan reports rail carrying 19 percent of port throughput in 2021 against a 50 percent target for 2030. Freight tonnage is published by KNBS from Kenya Railways returns. Debt service and fiscal cost are not shown at all.
๐ฐ๐ชKenyasince 2019dismantledbears on Large project delivery
Kenya's government registered 37,821,092 people for Huduma Namba from 2019, but by 14 October 2021 had printed 10,471,566 cards and seen 8,734,356 collected; the High Court quashed the card rollout that day, the Huduma Bill lapsed with the 12th Parliament in 2022, and the state piloted a separate Maisha Namba identity from November 2023.
The Ministry of Interior ran a mass biometric registration on fixed deadlines through 2019, before the Data Protection Act was in force and before the statute that would govern the system had passed, then tried to issue a card to the registered population. Courts held the card rollout unlawful for want of a data protection impact assessment, the enabling bill lapsed, and the next administration started a new identifier instead of finishing the card run.
Preconditions
A national registration bureau with offices in every county able to enrol tens of millions of people in weeks
A legal framework for the register and for data protection in force before collection begins, which Kenya lacked in 2019
Card production capacity sized to the registered population, which reached about a quarter of it by October 2021
Limits: Every count here is the government's own figure, sworn in an affidavit by the Interior Principal Secretary and quoted in a court ruling; no audit has published a reconciled number or the project's total cost. Registration is not issuance: fewer than three in ten registrants had a card printed when the court ruled, and the ruling does not say how many cards reached people after that date. No single published instrument ends Huduma Namba by name. The end is read from three facts in Kenya Law rulings: the High Court quashed the November 2020 card rollout in October 2021, the Huduma Bill that would have given the system its own statute lapsed when the 12th Parliament's term ended in August 2022, and the government piloted Maisha Namba as a separate identifier from 1 November 2023. The registration data may live on inside the successor system, so the dismantling is of the programme and its card, not proof that the data were deleted. The cause was legal as much as managerial: the courts held that the state collected biometric data before a data protection framework existed.
๐ฐ๐ชKenyasince 2015still operatingbears on Large project delivery
Kenya's Ministry of Energy and Kenya Power connected 683,762 beneficiaries to the grid under phases one to three of the Last Mile Connectivity Project by 30 April 2022, 89 percent of a target revised to 766,173 and two years after the 2020 end date, while the connection loans the project was to recover through prepaid tokens had returned Ksh 1 billion against Ksh 11 billion.
Kenya Power extended low-voltage lines from existing transformers to households within 600 metres, waived the upfront fee and recovered it as a Stima Loan deducted from prepaid token purchases, so the connection was free at the door and paid for out of later consumption.
Preconditions
A transformer network dense enough that short low-voltage extensions reach many households
Prepaid metering that lets the utility recover a loan from each purchase
Household consumption high enough to repay, which the audit found most beneficiaries did not reach
Limits: The audit counts connections from Kenya Power's own progress reports, and Kenya Power told the auditor that 723,910 were connected by October 2022 with the project 99 percent complete, a figure the audit reports but did not verify. The target was cut from 941,637 to 766,173 after design because some intended beneficiaries had already connected through the paid route, so 89 percent is against the lower number. Phase four, 181,320 beneficiaries of the original 1,145,957, had not started at the time of the audit because of a court case. A connection is not use: the auditor found meters mounted on boards on empty plots, stolen meters in use elsewhere, metering that took 74 to 509 days, unreliable supply, and that only 11 percent of sampled loan beneficiaries bought tokens above the expected Ksh 416 a month. Most of the money was loans from the World Bank and the African Development Bank, with Ksh 16 billion of government counterpart funding. Read from a scanned PDF with OCR text.
๐ฐ๐ชKenyasince 1998delivered and closedbears on Large project delivery
Kenya's National Hospital Insurance Fund grew to 16,859,910 principal members and 32.3 million people with dependants in 2023/24, and Kenya then replaced it with the Social Health Authority, whose Social Health Insurance Fund paid out 159 percent of the premiums it received in 2024/25.
Parliament repealed the NHIF Act in 2023 and the government moved its members into three new funds run by the Social Health Authority, so a fund that had grown mainly through informal-sector micro-insurance and sponsored members ended by decision rather than by collapse.
Preconditions
A statutory fund whose existence rested on one Act that a single parliamentary majority could repeal
A successor design that needed new registration of the whole membership
Premium income that did not cover the claims the new benefit package created
Limits: The status records the end of an institution, not a loss of registration: the same workbook shows the Social Health Authority with 20,997,620 registered members in 2024/25, more than NHIF's last principal-member count, although the two counts are defined differently and are not comparable. The 2023/24 NHIF figure is marked provisional. Both series are administrative counts supplied by the fund and its successor, which KNBS publishes but does not audit, and a registered member is not a person who received care. The repeal date comes from the Kenya Law record of the NHIF Act, not from this workbook. The 159 percent payout ratio is one year of a new scheme and may reflect a backlog carried over from NHIF.