The approach combines financing for businesses and infrastructure with efforts to strengthen financial markets and expand institutional investment.

The Kenya launch follows $1.2 billion in commitments across East Africa during BII’s previous five-year strategy period.

Its new approach places greater emphasis on partnerships that address financing barriers, including those preventing domestic savings from reaching companies and long-term infrastructure projects.

BII Chief Executive Officer Leslie Maasdorp convened a roundtable with Kenyan stakeholders to examine how local institutional investors could participate more actively in financing economic growth.

Discussions covered local-currency financing, blended finance, risk-sharing arrangements and capital-market instruments designed to attract additional investment.

Kenya’s pension industry illustrates the scale of the domestic capital available and its limited allocation to certain investments. Pension assets reached approximately $24.4 billion in June 2026, converted at the Central Bank of Kenya’s November 2 exchange rate.

Infrastructure debt instruments accounted for just 0.02% of the portfolio, while real estate investment trusts represented 0.62%, according to the Retirement Benefits Authority.

The regulator’s figures also show that government securities held 47.22% of pension assets, compared with a statutory investment ceiling of 10% for infrastructure debt instruments.

These allocations indicate room within existing regulatory limits for greater infrastructure investment, although attracting pension capital will require investments that meet funds’ risk, return and liquidity requirements.

“Kenya has a significant pool of domestic capital,” Maasdorp said, calling for partnerships that channel more local investment into businesses and infrastructure.

BII’s wider strategy prioritizes financial services, sustainable industries, and power, trade and digital infrastructure.

Its published framework combines investment with technical assistance and local partnerships to address constraints that financing alone cannot resolve, including limited investment-ready businesses and barriers to investor participation.

For East Africa, BII intends to explore whether financing approaches developed in Kenya can be applied in other markets, including Uganda, Ethiopia and Tanzania.

This gives the Kenya initiative a regional purpose: developing investment structures and partnerships that can help businesses access capital across markets with different financing conditions.

Alongside the strategy launch, BII is bringing venture capital investors, fund managers and entrepreneurs from Africa and South Asia together for its fourth Innovation for Impact Summit in Nairobi.

The event examines cross-border investment, artificial intelligence, responsible innovation, climate technology and changes in the investor landscape.

The strategy’s practical value will depend on whether BII’s investments and partnerships enable other investors to finance viable businesses and infrastructure.

In Kenya, the focus on domestic institutional capital puts pension funds and local financial markets at the center of that effort, linking the country’s accumulated savings more closely with its long-term financing needs.