The financial year 2024/25 was a year of consolidation, deepened ambition and measurable progress for Kenya’s cooperative and MSME sector. Operating within a macroeconomic environment shaped by continued recovery from the post-pandemic disruption, elevated cost of living pressures, currency volatility and the fiscal consolidation program of the Government, the Ministry pursued an integrated program of work that simultaneously addressed structural constraints in the cooperative movement, expanded support services for micro and small enterprises and created new pathways for enterprise formalization, market access and access to affordable finance. The year’s achievements reflect not only the dedication of the Ministry’s staff and the resilience of Kenya’s cooperative and enterprise communities, but also the power of coherent public policy, well-targeted investment and inclusive programming to catalyze economic opportunity at scale.
Kenya’s cooperative sector closed the 2024/25 financial year with a total of 22,814 registered cooperative societies, an increase of 1,286 over the year, reflecting continued public confidence in the cooperative model as a vehicle for collective economic action. Aggregate membership across all cooperative societies stood at 14.2 million, up from 13.6 million the previous year, underlining the cooperative movement’s role as one of the most widely participatory economic institutions in the country. The sector’s aggregate assets grew to Ksh 1.84 trillion, with Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOs) accounting for Ksh 1.12 trillion of this total — a testament to the confidence that members place in cooperative financial institutions and the capacity of the SACCO model in particular to mobilize domestic savings and channel them into productive household and enterprise investment.
The SACCO sub-sector, which represents the most economically significant segment of the cooperative movement, continued to grow robustly under the regulatory oversight of the SACCO Societies Regulatory Authority. Licensed deposit-taking SACCOs, whose members’ deposits are protected under the SACCO Deposit Guarantee Fund, numbered 176 by June 2025, with combined membership of 6.8 million and aggregate savings of Ksh 686 billion. The non-deposit-taking SACCO sub-sector, comprising a further 6,200
registered societies, mobilized additional savings of approximately Ksh 284 billion. Together, SACCOs lent approximately Ksh 840 billion to their members during the year— financing home construction and improvement, school fees, healthcare, small business working capital, agricultural inputs and a wide range of other household and enterprise needs that might otherwise have gone unmet due to the high cost of commercial bank credit. Agricultural cooperatives, which encompass organizations serving the coffee, tea, dairy, pyrethrum, cotton, sugarcane, fish and grain sub-sectors, continued to be a critical intermediary between smallholder farmers and commodity markets. The Ministry’s cooperative promotion and regulation efforts during the year focused on strengthening governance, improving value addition and reducing post-harvest losses in the agricultural cooperative sub-sector. The coffee cooperative sub-sector, which brings together an estimated 800,000 smallholder coffee farmers organized in 720 primary cooperative societies, benefited from a concerted program of value chain support including direct-to- consumer export facilitation, milling equipment grants and governance training, resulting in improved farmgate prices for members across Kiambu, Murang’a, Embu, Meru and Nyeri counties. The MSME sector presented a more complex and differentiated picture. On the one hand, the sector demonstrated extraordinary resilience and dynamism, with enterprise registration rates recovering strongly following the disruptions of 2022 and 2023, and new categories of digital and technology-enabled businesses expanding rapidly particularly among the youth cohort. On the other hand, structural constraints persisted: the high cost of credit, limited access to formal markets, inadequate business development services, low productivity in informal micro-enterprises, gender-based barriers to enterprise growth and the persistent challenge of enterprise formalization continued to limit the sector’s contribution to economic development below its potential. The Ministry’s MSME program during the year was designed to address these constraints systematically, through a combination of regulatory reform, targeted financial support, market linkage, capacity building and the deployment of digital platforms for enterprise registration, tax compliance and access to government procurement.
At the international level, the Ministry deepened Kenya’s engagement with the International Cooperative Alliance, the International Labour Organization’s cooperative program, UNCTAD’s enterprise development work and the African Union’s MSME development framework. Kenya chaired the African Cooperative Development Committee at the ICA Africa Regional Assembly held in Nairobi in November 2024, reinforcing its continental leadership in cooperative promotion. Bilateral memoranda of understanding were concluded with the Government of Rwanda for cooperation in cooperative legislation and supervision, with the Government of the Netherlands for sustainable agricultural cooperative development, and with the ILO for the implementation of a three-year cooperative resilience program targeting 500 agricultural cooperatives in arid and semi-arid counties.
The Ministry’s total budget for 2024/25 was Ksh 14.8 billion, comprising Ksh 10.2 billion for development expenditure and Ksh 4.6 billion for recurrent operations. This report is organized in four parts. Part I describes the Ministry’s institutional architecture, mandate, legislation, departments, agencies and staffing. Part II presents detailed accounts of achievements and challenges across seven program areas, together with budget measures implementation and KPI performance. Part III provides a transparent account of financial performance. Part IV sets out the strategic priorities for the coming period as the Ministry pursues its vision of a prosperous, inclusive and globally competitive cooperative and MSME sector.
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