BY SHADRACK MUYESU A World Bank report in April this year Projected Kenya’s GDP growth to decelerate to 5.5%, 0.5% down from the 2016 forecast. Among others, the report cited a subsisting drought, a rise in oil prices as well as a marked slowdown in credit growth to the private sector as causes for the slowdown. According to the report, however, medium term GDP growth was to recover to 5.8% in 2018 and 6.1% in 2019 respectively, depending on successful completion of the ongoing infrastructure projects, the strengthening of the global economy, tourism and the resolution of slow credit growth. Most…
Author: NBM CORRESPONDENT
Up to 64% of industrial manufacturers forecast zero or negative revenue growth, with only 2% expecting a positive revenue growth in the next six months according to the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) Barometer Report for the 3rd quarter – a publication used to measure the pulse of the Kenyan industrial sector using a number of indices. A daunting 53% of Kenyan manufacturers surveyed believe that Kenya’s economy has declined since the 2nd quarter of the year with a further 25% stating that the economy was stagnant. Only 22% believed the economy was growing. The economic outlook for the next 6 months…
BY BENARD AYIEKO In the modern corporate world, the role of marketing is just too important to be ignored. No company, small or large has failed to align her strategy with the realities of the market that comes with marketing. Competition for products and markets has taken a competitive approach and only those companies that can swim through this tight market tides will survive. Marketing has taken a central role in shaping the going concern of many companies by boosting sales and revenues. In fact, the survival of a company in this era of cutthroat competition for market share is…
Kenyans generally love football, despite the challenges the sport faces. And their other love, athletics, is a sport well associated with Kenya at the world stage, while our rugby 7s team (Shujaa) continues to be our high profile team sport. But no team can match in terms of African dominance the fete by our female volleyballers, The Malkia Strikers. They are the most successful and dominant team in the continent. Generation after generation, these queens have continued to churn out talent, including Doris Wefwafwa, Nancy Lijodi, Mary Ayuma, Violet Barasa, Dorcas Ndasaba, Janet Wanja, Brackcides Khadambi and Triza Atuka, who…
BY Christopher rosana As Maester Qyburn said in A Feast of Crows, ‘Knowing is the nature of my service’, I believed law school was the place my inquisitive mind would find solace and my argumentative self would find refuge. I was there to learn and then I realized that the law was a new language. Law school started with me groping for the meaning of words. Things were not making sense and I was, for a time, ‘seeing darkly as in a mirror’ as Paul quipped in his epistles of old. Scott Turow narrates, with gripping intensity, the rigors of…
BY TERRY MWANGI Nothing beats the urge of wanting to wear new clothes straight off the rack. They are so perfectly crisp, colors so bright, and the whites are so white! Who would ever want to ruin that? We get so excited that we never really give much thought about where these clothes have previously been before they found their way onto our bodies. Turns out there is a very important step between buying new clothes and wearing them that you have been missing – washing. Do you really want to wash that new pair of jeans? The answer to…
BY BONNIE CHIU When I was growing up, race was rarely discussed at home and at school. In Hong Kong, ethnic Chinese make up 95% of the population, and as a former British colony until 1997, some of us may be accustomed to seeing Caucasians we take for granted that white people disproportionately hold the powerful positions in society. Yet, since an incident in my childhood, I have become very aware of how people may judge each other by their skin colour. I am 100% Chinese, but I just happen to become tanned quite easily. When I was 10 years…
After several hours of bouncing up the Congo River in a motorboat, as my travel companions and I pulled into the muddy bank of a dilapidated military checkpoint—some crumbling colonial-era buildings, a lone solar panel, rows of bamboo huts—our small skiff was dwarfed by the only other motorized vessel we’d see that day. Belching black smoke into the humid air, the barge looked like it had been cobbled together out of spare pieces of wood and scrap metal. On the top deck, a cluster of women pounded manioc in buckets next to a smoking stove. Below deck, a girl trailed…
BY PETER WANYONYI Ukraine does not normally make much news in information and communications technology. But in December 2015, that changed rather dramatically. Two days before Christmas, engineers at one of Ukraine’s largest power stations suddenly realised that they had lost control of their computer systems to an unknown attacker. The engineers watched with horror as a remote agent took control of their main computer systems, including the monitors, and then proceeded to shut off power to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian homes. As this progressed, another attack was underway at a different Ukrainian power station – this one used…
Digital Shadows, the industry leader in digital risk management, has launched its Digital Risk Management Technology Ecosystem. Formed from almost a dozen technology companies, with more expected to join in the coming months, they all share a vision for how security analytics and security information and event management (SIEM), product orchestration and automation, risk & compliance, intelligence and network enforcement must work together to best protect customers from today’s digital risks. All initial ecosystem members will bring their individual, industry-proven strengths to enhance Digital Shadows’ intelligence and digital risk management capabilities which extend across the widest range of data sources…