Stahili × BCG · October 2026
Keeping the lights on: what 4,511 Kenyan small businesses told us about power cuts
A national survey with Boston Consulting Group on how unreliable grid power hits Kenya's micro, small and medium businesses: who stops trading, who stops investing, and what they'd pay to fix it.
- SME owners surveyed
- 4,511
- SME owners surveyed
- say outages cut or stop trading
- 79%
- say outages cut or stop trading
- would pay more for reliable power
- 74%
- would pay more for reliable power
Kenya has more than 7.4 million micro, small and medium enterprises. Together they account for around 40% of GDP and nearly 15 million jobs. Most of them run on grid electricity that, in the second half of 2025, failed on average 3.5 times a month for a total of 8.4 hours.
Stahili and Boston Consulting Group set out to measure what that actually costs the people running these businesses. Between March and July 2026, Stahili’s panel surveyed 4,511 SME owners across the country, from hair salons and dukas to welders and small factories. BCG published the findings in Business Daily in October 2026.
- say a power cut reduces or stops their trading
- 79%
- say a power cut reduces or stops their trading
- stop trading altogether until power returns
- 25%
- stop trading altogether until power returns
- have delayed buying stock or equipment
- 52%
- have delayed buying stock or equipment
- already use some form of backup power
- 89%
- already use some form of backup power
- would pay more for a reliable supply
- 74%
- would pay more for a reliable supply
n = 4,511 SME owners · fieldwork 14 Mar – 9 Jul 2026
The grid misses its own targets
The starting point is the supply itself. Against the regulator’s (EPRA’s) own reliability targets, Kenyan customers experienced three times as many interruptions, and well over five times as many hours without power.
Interruptions per month
3.0×
Hours without power per month
5.6×
Source: BCG, Business Daily (Oct 2026)
Who stops trading
Disruption is near-universal, but how badly a business is hit depends on what it does. Services that cannot work without power, such as salons, shops and restaurants, mostly shut or slow down. Trades with manual fallbacks fare better, though even for mechanics and butcheries more than half report an impact. (Their 42% “no change” also includes owners whose business wasn’t open during the outage.)
Source: Stahili × BCG Energy SME Survey, 2026 · 9 of 12 business types, n = 3,599
The hidden cost: investment that never happens
Lost trading hours are only the visible part. More than half of owners (52%) said unreliable power had made them put off buying stock or equipment. That is growth deferred, not just revenue lost. Shops and salons, the businesses most exposed to outages, are also the most likely to hold back.
The dashed line is the simple average of the nine business types shown (43%). That is a different measure from the 52% figure above, which is the share across all owners surveyed.
Willingness to pay
Owners aren’t waiting for the grid to fix itself: 89% already run some form of backup, and solar is both the most common choice and the purchase most often planned next. Crucially for anyone designing a commercial solution, 74% say they would pay more for a reliable supply. The demand exists; the question is how to deliver reliability at a price small businesses can carry.
How the data was built
The survey ran on Stahili’s national mobile panel, which collects tens of thousands of responses every day, and the results describe SME owners specifically rather than the wider public. Every figure on this page is reproduced from the published findings, and the charts are re-drawn in D3 from those numbers.