There is no doubt that Kenya is a nation bubbling with entrepreneurial energy. It looks like everybody is trying their hand at one business or the other.  Even people employed in full-time jobs have side hustles. This should be a great thing to celebrate, right?

Unfortunately, something is very wrong with this picture. The profile of entrepreneurship in Kenya throws up a very disturbing trend. The average entrepreneur in Kenya is involved in businesses that are part of a path so beaten it has become a rut.

Walk to any commercial building in any city or urban centre in Kenya and the picture is the same. Invariably, the businesses in the building are almost default settings in Kenya. There will be one or several chemists stuck in a nook, a number of secondhand clothes (mitumba) or shoes shops, and increasingly, shops stocking fashionable men’s wear.

Airtime vendors doubling as bank agents, retailers of household consumables like bread and milk, barber shops, cybers, water dispensers, and the inevitable liquor stores. There will also be mobile phone vendors with the ubiquitous DJ blaring music at the door and touting the latest offers.

Open air stalls (vibandas) are everywhere one turns. In these vibandas, businesses range from vendors of food to fruit, vegetables and any possible merchandise one can think of. Open air mechanics and carwash are at every conceivable corner, while a huge swathe of youth are busy dancing away in empty lots in estates as they make videos in an attempt to burst into the content creation industry. All vendors have simply bought goods from middlemen or imported them and marked them up for sale to the retail market. They have added zero value.

Bottom line is that these “entrepreneurs” are stuck in a rut. The prospects of their ever getting out that rut are next to nil as they are mired in a vortex of perpetual low returns that provide no room for savings to grow the business.

Other entrepreneurs are in a crazy race to build the next block of flats in plots that they have bought through an army of property brokers.

This is the entrepreneurial DNA of Kenyans. From this picture, it is obvious that nobody is interested in production. How will the country grow when its population is not producing anything?

Farms lie fallow across the country for lack of farmers, as youths head to towns to become hawkers. Yet if there is one thing that Kenya is seriously grappling with, it is a shortage of food on which it spends billions to import every year.

This is a critical question for Kenya. When will the country ever become an industrialised if it remains a nation of brokers? This is a nation whose gross domestic product (GDP) is built on brokerage, an economy that grows without creating any value. It will forever remain mired in a rut and can never lift itself out of poverty.

The government, policymakers, financiers, sociologists and other development and behaviourial experts must come together urgently and formulate a policy that changes this trajectory. This policy must seek to harness this massive entrepreneurial capacity available countrywide and channel it into production.

At the very core of this policy must be value addition and differentiation. An ecosystem that facilitates cottage industries or home-based production is urgently needed in Kenya. Cottage industries played a critical role in the industrialization of China and India.

Manufacturing in Kenya contributes a meagre 7.2 per cent to the GDP of the country. The government states that it wants to grow this to 20 per cent by 2030. With this structure of productive activity? A pipe dream!

The government must provide incentives and tax breaks to motivate entrepreneurs into production. Training and access to flexible financing arrangements will be key. The legal framework must be calibrated to support the cottage industry ecosystem. Importantly, start up cottage industries should get taxes and licenses by the national and county governments reduced to zero for five years, with additional incentives for those who set up in the rural areas.

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