The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) is eying a major real estate expansion that will see it develop new infrastructure, including data centres, warehouses, staff offices, housing, laboratories, and training centres.
The taxman said its operations and staff population have expanded substantially, piling strain on existing facilities.
“The Board of Directors and KRA leadership identified the need for a property development strategy to provide a conducive working environment to KRA staff while accommodating additional recruitment of staff from 8,523 in the year 2024 to 14,583 by the end of the year 2025,” said the KRA in a disclosure.
“The implementation of the property management strategy will significantly transform KRA properties and provide supportive infrastructure in helping business departments meet their revenue targets, reduce rental expenses, and support optimisation of collectable rent from existing estates, as well as to secure the available properties.”
The taxman currently has 82 real estate properties across the country, including Nairobi (16), the southern region (33), the western region (13), the Northern region (12), and the North Rift (8).
Records show that the KRA requires office space to accommodate 14,523 staff and 1,000 interns annually, warehouses to store impounded goods pending resolution of tax obligations, data centres to support its enhanced automation and digitisation initiative, and laboratories for verification of goods.
The KRA is presently scaling up automation and digitisation of its operations to enhance efficiency and collections, raising its demand for support infrastructure such as data centres.
The taxman further targets facilities to host training programmes and residential houses for its staff. It said it would implement the expansion project through a public-private-partnership (PPP) model.
“For projects identified to be funded under the PPP delivery model is a build-operate-and-transfer scheme where the private party will finance, construct, operate, and maintain the infrastructure facility and transfer the facility to the KRA at the end of a specified project term, which shall not exceed thirty years,” said the KRA.
