More Kenyans are now facing job loss due to high cost of living that makes the corporate institutions to close down.
The business community has warned,that Kenya is staring to more job loss due to high costs of operations.
The signal comes on the back of a freeze on fresh employment by a significant number of private firms in recent years.
The Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa) says local firms are yet to recover from a generally “tough economic environment” that started in late 2016 with a biting drought and legal caps on loan charges which hurt access to credit.
The umbrella organisation for businesses indicated some businesses have kept layoffs at bare minimum by putting on hold new investments, hiring of new employees and cutting budgets for corporate sponsorships.
Such cost-cutting measures, Kepsa’s head of policy research analysis and public-private dialogue Victor Ogalo says, are temporary and cannot be sustained for years.
Most are offering employees early retirement packages or if push comes to shove, just declare them redundant. Here are the numbers in the last one year:
Britam Holdings – 100 employees
Barclays Bank of Kenya: 323 employees
National Bank of Kenya – 150 employees
Family Bank – 150 employees
First Community Bank – 106 employees
Equity Bank – 400 employees
Standard Chartered Bank – 300 employees
Sidian Bank – 108 empoyees
NIC Bank – 32 employ
Kepsa lists the burden of high power costs for large factories, increased tax and levies and recurring hurdles in clearing and moving cargo along the Mombasa-Nairobi standard gauge railway as some of the challenges keeping cost of doing business high.