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Entrepreneur-led climate adaptation in Kenya

Alycia Leonard, Kuthea Nguti, Tonny Kukeera, Faith Njaramba, Stephanie Hirmer

Modern Nairobi cityscape – capital city of Kenya, East Africa

Summary

Low- and middle-income countries, on the front lines of climate change impacts, rely on entrepreneurs to provide critical adaptation services (eg in the agricultural and energy sectors). However, the perspectives, motivations, and approaches of climate entrepreneurs are minimally documented, which prevents replication of their effective strategies at scale.

This study therefore investigates the experiences of climate adaptation entrepreneurs in Kenya. We find that entrepreneurs are motivated to address climate adaptation issues both due to market gaps and their own underlying ideals and values. They report that their businesses are already creating simultaneous environmental, economic, and social impact at a small scale. However, they face a lack of appropriate finance and technical capacity to support scaled-up implementation of innovation-heavy emerging climate technologies. Due to a lack of awareness among consumers and regulators, they report resistance to novel offerings and both over- and under-regulation (ie a lack of technology-specific regulation while being bound to outdated regulation in multiple adjacent sectors eg energy, agriculture, transport).

Nevertheless, they see opportunities for their businesses to expand via increased supply chain synergies, circular economy strategies, and consumer-centric subscription-based business models. To tackle challenges while growing the sector, regulation specific to emerging climate adaptation sectors is needed to minimise friction and create appropriate technology push and demand pull. If entrepreneurs are trained in financial literacy and supported in monitoring and evaluation, they could attract long-term impact-driven investment.

A cooperative and consumer-centric business approach is seen as the most likely to succeed, and specialisation throughout climate technology supply chains is seen as a way to accelerate progress.

Read the complete Policy Brief here.