Moderna, Taifa Gas deals lift Kenya’s FDI
Monday January 08 2024
Kenya’s President William Ruto (left) and Taifa Gas Group Chairman Rostam Aziz during the ground-breaking ceremony of the 30,000-tonne plant at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Likoni, Mombasa on February 24, 2023. PHOTO | WACHIRA MWANGI | NMG
The deals Kenya signed with US firm, Moderna, for building a vaccines factory and Taifa Gas of Tanzania for cooking gas refilling plant helped the government to meet the target for foreign direct investments last financial year, authorities say.
The Investment Promotion desk says the deals, together with three others, were pivotal to unlocking slightly more than Ksh135.85 billion ($861 million) in flows for the year ended June 2023.
The FDIs that will be fully realised when the projects are completed in subsequent years, overshot the Ksh100 billion ($633.9 million) the government had set.
“This is attributed to signing of MoUs [memorandum of understanding] by Moderna, Taifa Gas, UK Green and Kisumu County, ICRC and AA Jumbo,” the department, headed by Principal Secretary Abubakar Hassan, wrote in a budgetary report to guide the expenditure for the next financial year from July 2024.
Kenya finalised an agreement with Moderna in March last year to set up for manufacturing of mRNA vaccines in Nairobi to serve Africa, concluding the talks that started under the pevious regime of Uhuru Kenyatta in March 2022. The construction of the planned $500 million vaccines plant, the first of its kind on the continent with a proposed capacity of 500 million doses each year, is yet to start.
Read: Moderna looks beyond Covid vaccines for Kenya factory
Moderna chief executive Stephane Bancel said in March 2023 that the plant will concentrate on making vaccines for unmet needs on the continent such as acute respiratory infections and persistent infectious diseases such as HIV and outbreaks such as Zika and Ebola.
The William Ruto administration also finalised the setting up of a 30,000-metric tonne liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) handling facility by Taifa Gas owned by tycoon Rostam Aziz.
Dr Ruto presided over the ground breaking event for the LPG plant in Mombasa in February 2023, nearly two years after the MoU was reached when President Samia Suluhu’s visited Kenya in May 2021.
Read: Taifa Gas to build $130m plant in Kenya
Kisumu, United Green
The actual construction of the plant in Mombasa, whose total cost was estimated at Ksh16 billion ($101 million), started late last month.
The State has further cited the October 2022 deal between Kisumu County and UK investment firm, United Green, for facilitating climate-smart farming around Lake Victoria as a major driver of FDI flows in the review period.