NAIROBI, Kenya July 9 – Kenya’s fast-growing SACCO sector is facing a major challenge that could affect thousands of borrowers seeking loans, with experts warning that many lenders are making decisions without seeing a member’s complete debt history.
Despite the sector growing to more than Sh1 trillion in assets, many SACCOs especially smaller ones still cannot access a full picture of what their members owe elsewhere, increasing the risk of bad lending decisions.
Speaking during the Credit Community Workshop in Mombasa, Gideon Kipyakwai, the Chief Executive Officer of Metropol Credit Reference Bureau (CRB), said the problem is not a lack of trust between SACCOs and their members, but a lack of complete information.
“A SACCO official in Mombasa can tell you exactly how a member has behaved for fifteen years, that’s real, valuable knowledge,” Kipyakwai said.
“What the data shows us is that this same member may already be carrying debt the SACCO has no way of seeing. That’s not a failure of the SACCO. It’s a gap in the information available to it, and it’s a gap we can close.”
He said integrating credit bureau information with the long-standing relationship SACCOs already have with members would help lenders make faster and safer loan decisions.
“Our theme this week is about integrating that missing insight into every lending decision, faster, so a member’s fifteen years of trust and their full financial picture finally sit in the same room,” he added.
According to figures from the Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority (SASRA), Kenya’s SACCO sector surpassed Sh1 trillion in assets for the first time in 2024, while gross loans rose by 11.4 per cent to Sh845 billion.
However, the figures also show that only 60 large deposit-taking SACCOs out of the 176 licensed in 2026 control 77 per cent of the sector’s total assets, leaving many smaller SACCOs operating with fewer resources and less access to advanced credit assessment tools.
Kipyakwai noted that smaller SACCOs are not less committed to serving members but simply have fewer resources to build sophisticated lending systems.
“It means a member walking into a small SACCO in Mombasa may be assessed with far less information than the same member would face at one of the sector’s largest players,” he said.
“Shared credit bureau data closes that gap without requiring the smaller SACCO to match the larger one’s budget.”
He added that the goal is to ensure that where a person banks does not determine how well their financial history is understood.
“We’re the infrastructure underneath the decision, not the lender and not the regulator,” Kipyakwai said.
“Our role is to make sure that a SACCO serving a fishing community in Likoni has access to the same depth of credit information as one of the country’s largest SACCOs.”
According to Kipyakwai, the future of SACCO lending should benefit ordinary Kenyans who rely on quick access to affordable credit.
“It looks like a faster ‘yes’ for the borrower who deserves it, and an earlier warning sign for the one who’s already overextended,” he said.
“The future SACCO isn’t a slogan. It’s a member getting a fair, fast decision because the SACCO finally has the full picture.”
