Client Context

The structure of Kenya's labour market makes conventional pension coverage arithmetic impossible: the large majority of working Kenyans earn in the informal economy, with irregular incomes, no employer to make contributions, and little contact with formal financial institutions. The Kenya National Entrepreneurs Savings Trust, KNEST Plc, was established to close that gap, providing pension services designed for informal sector workers, including the smallest savers the industry has never profitably reached.

A mandate that ambitious cannot be run on institutional instinct. The Trust required a strategic plan that would define its market understanding, its product and channel strategy, its institutional development path, and the measurable outcomes against which its board, its regulator, and the government could hold it to account across its formative five years.

The Challenge

Strategic planning for KNEST posed a problem most institutional strategy work never confronts: the target market's relationship with the product is the central unknown. Informal sector workers do not lack the desire for old-age security. They lack products that fit irregular incomes, trust in institutions that have failed them before, and channels that meet them where they earn. A strategy built in a boardroom from industry assumptions would replicate the exact design failures that left the informal sector uncovered in the first place.

The plan also had to hold together as an institutional strategy, not just a market analysis. The Trust needed its mission, vision, and values settled with genuine board and management ownership, a clear-eyed reading of its operating environment, strategy pillars connecting market insight to institutional action, and an implementation and results framework realistic for a young organisation still building its own capabilities.

Our Approach

ACAL built the engagement around a principle: understand the saver first, then design the institution around that understanding.