Principal Secretary in the State Department for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Development, Susan Mang’eni, has stated that Kenyans are free to borrow from the Hustler Fund in times of distress to take care of immediate challenges.

Speaking during an engagement on the ambitious project on a local TV station on Tuesday, August 12, 2025, Mang’eni indicated that the personal loan product in the Hustler Fund allows borrowers to access the loan and repay when they can.

“There is nothing wrong with borrowing the Hustler Fund for consumption. The personal loan was like a credit card given to Kenyans. If you are under distress, we can borrow and repay when we get the means,” Mang’eni said.

Credit history

She indicated that the flagship project was put in place to allow Kenyans who lacked a credit history to develop one based on their borrowing and repayment trends.

“Hustler Fund exists to establish credit profiles of all Kenyans who did not have a history with banks to assess their ability to borrow and willingness to repay,” Mang’eni observed.

“When Hustler Fund was launched, we had a number of Kenyans who had been listed in the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB).”

Policy intervention

She stated that while conventional lenders require payslips and collateral as guarantees for a loan, the government developed the Hustler Fund to ensure that large swathes of the population left out by creditors can be covered.

“Hustler Fund is a policy intervention that seeks to correct failures in the credit market. A majority of Kenyans are not bankable and are not being served by the financial institutions,” Mang’eni noted.

“A majority of these are the young people who do not own means of production, and have no access to the conventional collateral.”

A new report by the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) has sharply criticised the Hustler Fund, describing it as a politically expedient but economically disastrous initiative that has failed to deliver on its promises of financial empowerment for low-income Kenyans.

The report titled Failing the Hustlers which was released to the public by KHRC on Monday, August 4, 2025, concludes that the Hustler Fund is structurally unsound, economically unsustainable, and politically manipulated, and recommends that the government scrap it entirely.