By Rajul Malde
Slightly over half a year ago, Kenya’s president, William Ruto, was in Kilifi to launch the Vipingo Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a landmark 2,000-acre project that is envisioned to create 35,000 jobs.
For many observers, the headline numbers captured the moment, but for those of us invested in the real economy of the county, the significance lies more in what such initiatives unlock.
The Vipingo SEZ is leveraging government incentives designed to attract both public and private capital to the tune of Sh390 billion, an ambitious effort to catalyse large-scale economic transformation.
My enthusiasm for this initiative may partly reflect proximity bias, but it is also informed by experience.
For quite some time, Pwani Oil Products Limited has been one of a handful of enterprises tasked, implicitly and explicitly, with transforming the economy of Kilifi County.
So far, we have been able to directly and indirectly employ over 2000 people around our Kikambala operations, but the scale of need far exceeds the contribution of any single firm.
According to government data, 870,425 people in Kilifi, or 59.9 percent of the county’s population, are multidimensionally poor.
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This means they suffer from overlapping deprivations that extend beyond income to include poor health outcomes, limited access to education and low living standards.
This is despite the county being resource rich, with reserves of manganese, salt and titanium, alongside unique building materials and a coastline that supports both tourism and blue economy activities.
Such quagmires are familiar across Kenya, with resource abundance sometimes not automatically translating into shared prosperity.
This is why the renewed focus on industrialisation, anchored by special economic zones and targeted investment promotion, deserves attention.
Kenya’s manufacturing sector has hovered at around 7 to 8 percent of GDP for years, well below the 20 percent aspiration outlined in the government’s long term development blueprint, Vision 2030.
Special economic zones, like the one under development in Vipingo, offer a realistic pathway to bridge that gap by clustering infrastructure, allowing both domestic and foreign investors to take calculated risks.
But the real test for investors in counties like Kilifi is to ensure that local communities participate meaningfully in the opportunities created.
This requires deliberate alignment between investors, county governments and local institutions, with skills development being central to the equation.
Without a workforce that can meet the needs of emerging industries, the promise of job creation risks being diluted.
From a private sector perspective, partnerships with technical training institutions can help close this gap.
At Pwani Oil, we have seen firsthand how targeted training programmes can improve productivity while creating upward mobility for employees. Scaling such initiatives across sectors will be essential if the anticipated 35,000 jobs are to deliver lasting impact.
There is also a broader lesson about the role of policy consistency. Investors, particularly those committing capital at the scale of investments in the Vipingo SEZ, are making long term bets and require assurance that the policy environment will remain stable across political cycles.
In recent years, the government has signalled its commitment to improving the ease of doing business, even as it navigates fiscal pressures and competing priorities.
As this happens, critics may argue that investment pledges do not always materialise or that special economic zones can become enclaves disconnected from local economies. These concerns are valid and should not be dismissed, but the cost of inaction is simply too high for counties where poverty remains entrenched.
The unfolding in Kilifi is, in many ways, a microcosm of Kenya’s broader economic journey, reflecting the tension between potential and performance.
It also highlights the importance of persistence because transforming a county economy is the cumulative outcome of sustained effort by both the public and private sectors.
For those of us operating on the ground, we choose to view every new factory and every incremental improvement in infrastructure as contributors to a larger story of change.
If executed well, the Vipingo SEZ can catalyse further investment and most importantly, offer tangible hope to the hundreds of thousands of residents who have long been excluded from Kenya’s growth story.
The writer is the Commercial Director at Pwani Oil Products Limited
