Where matters faith and business converge

Secondly, business leaders were footing the event costs. But it is what I took away that stayed in my mind. A profound insight, courtesy of Rev Steve Makau. Faith is good for business. It is not anti-enterprise. Let it inform strategy.

What do you call the belief that a set of assumptions will be proven true? Faith.

This is the basis of project finance. True, we document the assumptions underlying the financial projections so that another analyst can reconstruct the basis of our model, but they are that – assumptions. As to the level of inflation, exchange rate, business confidence, oil and steel prices, and so on.

In religion, faith is the belief and trust in God, based on good evidence, but without total proof. To have faith is to trust that God is there and impacting our lives, even though we can’t see him with our own eyes.

The word faith also finds common usage. For instance, when you have confidence in someone or something, you say that you have faith in them.

Conversely, when you lose confidence in someone, you say that you have lost faith in them. Today, many Kenyans say that they have lost faith in politicians.

Faith and trust are closely related and intertwined concepts. There all however, subtle distinctions. Faith is a belief system, a conviction or trust in something or someone.

Trust is an action, a reliance on someone or something based on past experiences or perceived reliability. Faith, therefore often precedes and informs trust.

Entrepreneurs demonstrate incredible faith. You start a business expecting that customers will come. You get a clever consultant to help you model it, creating financial projections, based on various assumptions.

These assumptions properly thought through are good evidence that the business could succeed. But they are not total proof. That is why you conduct sensitivity analysis, varying the key assumptions to test the projected profitability and financial viability.

But something unusual is happening on the economic front. Faith is in short supply. Ordinarily, low inflation, a stable exchange rate and decreasing interest rates point to more favourable economic conditions.

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The data is showing that the economy may have turned the corner. We therefore expect business confidence to return and spur investments. But, the doom and gloom persist. Output accelerated briefly to February 2025, before sliding back to contraction territory.

Analysts had expected an economic stimulus to support that recovery. In the event, the 2025/26 budget did not deliver such a stimulus. Absent the support, business confidence and growth of credit to the private sector are yet to recover.

According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, Kenyans are a skeptical lot. The percentage of Kenyans who worry that government leaders (80 percent), business leaders (74 percent), journalists and reporters (71 percent) purposely mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations, has increased between six and nine percent from 2021 to 2025.

Not unique to us, these trends follow the general erosion of trust in traditional institutions.

Back to the CITAM business breakfast. Religious convictions can instill a strong sense of honesty and trust, positively impact business relationships, economic transactions, and approaches to ethical questions like corruption.

Some religious traditions emphasise hard work and diligence, perfect for higher productivity and economic growth. They foster behaviours such as saving, investing, and engaging in productive activities, all which support economic growth. Faith meets enterprise.

Economists are trying to understand why strong negative sentiments persist despite some positive economic numbers. One current theory explains it as a consequence of the low trust environment we live in.

Trust, the theory goes, is positively correlated with economic prosperity. Low trust societies have a harder time creating and sustaining prosperity, because of the outcomes of societal processes.

These outcomes include poor corporate cultures, easily corruptible institutions, dysfunctional private property rights, distrusted court systems, non-acceptance of electoral outcomes and low voluntary tax payment. A very Kenyan sounding laundry list of woes.

If we are doing poorly because we do not believe things can or will be better, what can restore our faith, to let it inform our strategies?

Ndiritu Muriithi is an economist and partner at Ecocapp Capital.  He is also the chairman of KRA and former governor of Laikipia County. Email: [email protected]