- The Industrial Park is to be located in Enosupukia, together with a leather Industrial park in Kenanie and modernisation of Rivatex.
- It remains to be seen just how much the State will put on the table to cajole the owners to sell their land.
- Mr. Kenyatta is keen to raise the GDP contribution of manufacturing to 15 per cent by the time he leaves office in 2022.
Failure to secure land had previously delayed the building of the park initially floated as a Nakuru County project.
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Kenya’s industrial park to be built in Naivasha has begun to take shape after Parliament allocated Sh3.4 billion for the project in its latest public expenditure reorganisation.
The money will be used for the acquisition of land as the country moves to turn the grand idea into reality.
While money is crucial it is however not the project single headache, land is what has been keeping the officials awake at night.
Failure to secure land had previously delayed the building of the park initially floated as a Nakuru County project.
It therefore remains to be seen just how much the State will put on the table to cajole the owners to sell their land in an area worst hit by unrestrained subdivision of land, a scenario which saw Nakuru County ban subdivision of plots that are less than five acres.
The Industrial Park is to be located in Enosupukia, together with a leather Industrial park in Kenanie and modernisation of Rivatex have been flagged off among the priority areas.
President Uhuru Kenyatta has identified manufacturing as one of the four pillars his administration will like to focus on in lifting the economy - currently at 4.9 percent and forecasted to hit 5.5 percent as at the end of 2018 according to the Worldbank – and this ‘political goodwill’ may just hasten things up.
Mr. Kenyatta is keen to raise the GDP contribution of manufacturing — which reached 8.4 per cent last year — to 15 per cent by the time he leaves office in 2022.
The allocation was however not without a casualty, the supplementary budget tabled in Parliament last week, wants to cut Sh285 million from the Kenanie Leather Industrial park budget to be used instead in the construction of constituency industrial development centres under the government’s standards and business incubation programme.
The industrial park production units will be linked to markets by the standard gauge railway (SGR) line.
Kenya Railways says contractor for the phase 2A of the SGR is finally ready to start work after high cost of land almost ruined the project.