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IMF sets January staff visit on new Kenya programme
President William Ruto during a past meeting with the IMF Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva on the sidelines of COP27 in Sharma El-Sheikh, Egypt.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has set a new staff visit to Kenya in January as the multilateral lender extends discussions on a new funded programme with the country.
The new mission comes on the heels of a meeting between President William Ruto and IMF Director General Kristalina Georgieva in Washington DC last week.
The fresh visit keeps alive the chance of a new programme from the fund, despite various sticky points including a disagreement over the treatment of securitized government revenue as debt.
Kenyan authorities have also differed on the need for a fresh IMF programme as the country pushes to establish itself as an upper-middle income economy.
“We continue to have discussions with the IMF on getting a new funded programme. The President met with the Managing Director of the fund last week and we do expect a staff visit from the fund sometime in January to continue the discussions on the programme,” CBK Governor Dr Kamau Thugge said on Wednesday.
A team from the IMF led by Kenya’s mission chief Haimanot Teferra concluded its first staff visit over the programme on October 9, 2025, before moving discussions to the fund’s Washington DC headquarters.
Kenya is seeking a successor programme from the IMF to not only unlock new financing from the fund but also retain a credible framework of fiscal reforms to anchor debt sustainability.
The IMF pulled the plug on its previous arrangement with Kenya in March this year, a month to the programme’s expiry, after the country struggled to meet key performance targets including domestic revenue mobilisation from taxes.
Kenya faces limited scope of new financing from the IMF from the near exhaustion of its allowed quota of resources but expects to open more room by making paydowns on previously borrowed funds.
As at the end of June 2025, Kenya could only access Sh64.8 billion ($501.4 million) under normal access limits.
Kenya’s access to IMF funding is capped at six times its quota or Sh604.7 billion ($4.68 billion) cumulatively but it had already tapped Sh536.3 billion ($4.15 billion).
Dr David Ndii, the chairperson of the Presidential Council of Economic Advisors previously noted that there was no consensus among government officials on the push for a new financing deal as some mull skipping the assistance to appeal to capital markets on its fiscal maturity.
“Do we need an IMF programme? I don’t think we have a meeting of minds internally on why we need it, but that’s because of uncertainties on shocks,” he said.
“In the long haul, our goal is to transition from a lower-middle income to an upper-middle income country. Part of that means being more market-facing than seeking multilateral financing.”
Kenya and the IMF have also differed on whether securitised arrears should form part of the debt stock with the fund insisting that securitized debt is a sovereign liability.
The National Treasury however considers such arrears to be non-State liabilities with the difference in opinion emerging as Kenya securitises part of its collections from the Roads Maintenance Levy Fund (RMLF) to pay investors who buy bonds to pay for road sector pending bills.
National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi says the securitised debt is owed by special purpose vehicles hence removing it from the government’s balance sheet.
“Our position as the government is that once you sell a right to a special purpose vehicle (SPV), then there is no risk to the government at all. The IMF feels that we should treat it as sovereign debt,” he said previously.
The IMF says it maintains its support for Kenya despite the contest on policy and previously missed programme performance targets.
