By James Okoth
Members of Parliament drawn from both the Senate and the National Assembly are convening in Kisumu City this morning for a high-level strategic dialogue aimed at strengthening collaboration with international development partners, financial institutions, and the private sector to mobilise robust climate finance across the country.
The two-day forum, dubbed the Kenya Parliamentary Green Investment Dialogue (GID) 2026, being held at the Acacia Premier Hotel, is convened under the Parliamentarians for Climate Finance (PCF) project.
The event is backed by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and organised in partnership with the Climate Parliament, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and the Parliamentary Steering Committee on Climate Finance.
Co-chaired by Senator Moses Kajwang’ and Njoro lawmaker, Hon. Charity Kathambi Chepkwony, this year’s dialogue marks a deliberate shift from policy exploration to direct legislative action and accountability. It is aimed at building directly upon the foundational policy roadmap established during the inaugural dialogue held in Mombasa in July 2025.
With Kenya facing mounting climate pressures, including erratic rainfall, rising temperatures, and prolonged droughts, lawmakers are seeking concrete pathways to bridge the gap between national climate ambitions and actual investment flows.
“Kenya continues to face mounting climate pressures, from erratic rainfall to rising temperatures, yet finance and investment flows remain significantly below what is required. This event will focus on turning policy into structured, investment-ready realities,” the dialogue organisers noted in a brief to participants.
While Kenya’s updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) set aggressive targets for emissions reduction, current financing remains significantly below what is required.
The core priorities anchoring this year’s agenda include the establishment of Green Energy Zones (GEZs), which involve de-risking community-scale mini-grids, industrial parks, and Special Economic Zones to aggregate energy demand and attract blended finance.
The forum will also focus on the Clean Cooking Transition, which seeks to unlock concessional capital and first-loss guarantees to transition public institutions away from biomass.
A primary focal point of the dialogue is Kenya’s institutional energy challenge. Approximately 90% of the country’s 97,000 public facilities—predominantly schools—still rely entirely on firewood for cooking, consuming an estimated 1.3 million tonnes of wood annually.
To address this, the Parliamentary Steering Committee has formally endorsed the Programme for Accelerating Clean Cooking Transition in Kenya (PACCT). This framework targets GCF support to transition institutions to electric cooking solutions through innovative Energy as a Service (EaaS) models.
Along with other participants, lawmakers are scheduled to experience first-hand the circular economy at Dunga Beach. The critical field visit to Dunga Beach is aimed at granting the lawmakers a face-to-face experience of how an invasive environmental nightmare caused by the water hyacinth has been transformed into an economic engine – a water hyacinth-to-biogas project managed by Biogas International.
Under the initiative, the water hyacinth, which has long choked Lake Victoria’s aquatic life and paralysed local fishing, is now being harvested and combined with fish and food waste.
Lawmakers will also be taken through how anaerobic digestion through the Flexi Biogas system cleanly converts this destructive biomass into high-quality organic biofertiliser and renewable biogas.
By utilising this clean energy source, the local community has successfully displaced traditional firewood, saving local trees, curbing hazardous smoke inhalation, and lowering household costs.
As part of the dialogue, lawmakers will also conduct another field site visit to Nyawara Girls High School to witness a hybrid clean cooking model in action. By introducing a 300-litre electric cookstove alongside traditional firewood, the school managed to drop its termly firewood expenditure from Kshs 150,000 to Kshs 90,000, illustrating a scalable blueprint for green institutional management.
During the forum, legislators are also scheduled to participate in capacity-building sessions covering Carbon Markets, Article 6 Oversight, and Digital Climate Monitoring and Accountability Tools (CMAT).
The final sessions will bring together investors, MPs, and development partners for guided drafting exercises. The outcomes of this final session are expected to feed directly into a legislative roadmap that the lawmakers will champion in Parliament, including a Motion on institutional clean cooking currently being spearheaded by Senator Hamida Ali Kibwana.
