President William Ruto convened a high-level meeting with the leadership of Access Bank Plc, the new investors in the National Bank of Kenya, underscoring a growing partnership between Kenya’s government and global financial players aimed at driving economic transformation and long-term investment.
The discussions, held at State House in Nairobi, were led on the side of Access Bank by Group Managing Director Roosevelt Ogbonna alongside National Bank of Kenya Managing Director George Odhiambo. The meeting focused on strategic collaboration between the government and the pan-continental lender — which has a significant footprint spanning more than 20 countries across Africa, Europe and Asia — around Kenya’s newly-launched developmental financing vehicles.
President Ruto highlighted the central role that tools such as the National Infrastructure Fund and the Sovereign Wealth Fund are expected to play in catalysing investment across key sectors of the economy, including transport, energy and industrialisation. These funds, recently approved by Cabinet and set to anchor a KSh5 trillion transformation agenda, are designed to mobilise capital for long-term national priorities while reducing dependence on public debt burden and taxation.
The National Infrastructure Fund is structured as a professionally managed vehicle to attract private capital into high-impact projects by ring-fencing proceeds from privatisations and other domestic resources. Likewise, the Sovereign Wealth Fund aims to safeguard national revenues from natural resources and public investments, boosting fiscal resilience and ensuring future generations benefit from Kenya’s wealth.
In the State House engagement, both the President and the Access Bank team agreed on the need to align financial resources with Kenya’s development priorities, particularly by enabling greater private sector participation in financing the country’s infrastructure and economic agenda.
For Access Bank — which completed the acquisition of the National Bank of Kenya earlier last year as part of its East African expansion — the meeting was an opportunity to deepen engagement with Kenya’s economic blueprint and to explore avenues for channeling finance into transformative projects that underpin growth and job creation.
President Ruto’s engagement with global financiers such as Access Bank reflects his broader strategy of showcasing Kenya as a compelling investment destination and harnessing private sector capital for national development, a theme he has championed in multiple international forums and domestic policy platforms.
