Kenya

Political relations

Relations between France and Kenya have become considerably closer since the French President’s visit to Kenya on 13 and 14 March 2019 and President Kenyatta’s visit to France from 29 September to 2 October 2020.

In 2020, France allocated €252 million in official development assistance to Kenya, a 71% rise on the year before. France is Kenya’s fourth-largest bilateral donor. This assistance is mainly made up of loans, particularly in the production and economic services sectors. Kenya is not on the list of priority countries for official development assistance identified by France’s Interministerial Committee for International Cooperation and Development (CICID) in 2018.

Some 120 French businesses are present in Kenya. Kenya is seen as a hub for access to the East African Community’s markets, thanks to the quality of logistics, financial and legal services and private sector openness, which make it a key place to install French companies and expand in the regional environment.

The main sectors of our bilateral cooperation include infrastructure (public-private partnership highway, commuter rail project), development (energy, water, sanitation, urban development), education (2019 roadmap, financing of a scientific campus at the University of Nairobi) and health, with support under the GESDeK (Governance for Enabling Service Delivery and Public Investment in Kenya) programme.
 

Economic relations

Kenya remains a minor trading partner for France, which is only the country’s 97^th-largest supplier and 108^th-largest customer. Bilateral trade has, however, been growing continually for a decade, consolidating France’s structural trade surplus with Kenya. France’s exports to Kenya stood at €174.5 million in 2022, a rise on the previous year, and are primarily made up of mechanical equipment, chemicals, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and agricultural products. The recent establishment of several major French companies, including Decathlon, should lead to increased trade between the two countries. Agricultural, forestry, fishery and aquaculture products are the main French imports from Kenya, as well as agrifood products.

France was Kenya’s fourth-largest foreign investor in 2017, accounting for more than $500 billion of investment stock in the country – or 7.5%. French investments in Kenya include around a hundred companies (such as Schneider Electric, L’Oréal, Danone, Essilor, Limagrain, OCEA, Vinci, Egis, Accor, Sodexo and Peugeot) operating in a number of sectors, including transport, health, construction, energy, automobile vehicles, telecommunications, financial services and retail.

Moreover, during President Kenyatta’s visit to Paris in October 2020, several economic agreements were signed, including for two major projects: one on the building of the Nairobi–Nakuru–Mau Summit Highway, and one on the construction of a railway linking the existing transport network to Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.