By The Nairobi Securities Exchange wants to reinvent itself.
Speaking at an Enza Capital session during the Africa Tech Summit on February 12, NSE Chief Listing Officer Gift Kori announced that the exchange is actively exploring a dedicated technology board — a specialised segment designed specifically for venture-backed, high-growth startups that have historically found the NSE inaccessible, irrelevant, or both.
"We've always had this market perception that the NSE, particularly, is for blue chips," Kori said. "That only the very big companies can come here to raise capital. That's something we are deliberately trying to change."
It is a compelling pitch. Kenya is widely regarded as East Africa's tech capital. Nairobi has produced Twiga Foods, Wasoko, Lipa Later, and dozens of VC-backed ventures that have collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars. And yet, if you open the NSE trading board today, you will find Safaricom, Equity Group, East African Breweries, and British American Tobacco staring back at you. The Silicon Savannah's startups are nowhere in sight.
The NSE wants to change that. The question worth asking — and one that most coverage of this announcement has not asked — is whether it can.
The Ibuka Problem
Before you can evaluate whether a dedicated tech board is a serious plan or institutional wishful thinking, you need to understand what happened with Ibuka.
In December 2018, the NSE launched Ibuka — a Swahili word meaning "to emerge" — as an incubation and acceleration programme designed to prepare small and medium enterprises for eventual listing. Companies would join the Incubator Board, undergo financial and governance restructuring, then graduate to the Accelerator Board where they would be positioned to raise capital and go public.
Thirty-plus firms enrolled. The NSE projected multiple listings. Investors were cautiously optimistic.
By 2024, after five years of operation, exactly one company had successfully listed through Ibuka: Homeboyz Entertainment Limited, which listed by introduction in December 2020. Listing "by introduction" means a company lists its existing shares without raising new capital — the lightest possible version of a public listing.
Two of the programme's most prominent members did not just fail to list — they collapsed entirely. Tuskys Supermarket, once one of Kenya's largest retail chains serving over 10 million customers monthly, was ordered into liquidation by the High Court after accumulating debts of Ksh 20 billion. Vehicle and Equipment Leasing Limited (Vaell), described as East Africa's market leader in asset leasing, was placed under administration after defaulting on Ksh 1.1 billion in creditor obligations.
Kori himself acknowledged this history directly. "While it was well intentioned," he said of Ibuka, "it did not see the success it was meant to have."
That is a significant admission. And it raises an immediate question: what is structurally different about a tech board that would produce a different result?
What the NSE Says Has Changed
Kori's answer is regulatory. Recent reforms now allow the NSE to create sector-specific sub-boards under its two main segments — the Main Investment Market and the Growth Enterprise Market Segment (GEMS). Previously, the exchange operated under a more rigid structure that made tailored, sector-specific offerings difficult to design. The new flexibility, Kori argues, is the "icing on the cake" that makes a tech-focused board genuinely viable.
The logic is that a dedicated tech board can be designed around the realities of venture-backed companies: different valuation frameworks, different profitability timelines, different disclosure requirements. Traditional listing requirements at the NSE were built for mature, cash-generating companies — not pre-profit startups whose value lies in growth trajectory and market potential rather than historical earnings.
The NSE also points to liquidity as a solvable problem. Kenya's money market funds have grown substantially over the past two years, driven by rising interest rates that attracted a wave of retail savings. The exchange argues the capital is available — the challenge is mobilising it toward higher-risk, high-growth tech companies rather than Treasury bills and money market instruments.
And then there is Ziidi Trader. The launch of Safaricom's M-Pesa-integrated retail trading platform in February 2026 has meaningfully lowered the barrier to stock market participation for a new generation of Kenyan investors. If young, digital-first investors are now buying shares from their phones, the argument goes, a tech board listing could find a receptive retail audience that did not exist five years ago.
The Nigeria Warning
Here is where the analysis gets uncomfortable, and where most coverage of this story has stopped short.
The NSE is not the first African exchange to attempt this. In 2022, the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) created a dedicated technology board with the same stated intention: attract high-growth tech companies and bridge the gap between the startup ecosystem and public markets.
As of today, the NGX tech board has not attracted a single listing.
Analysts who have examined the Nigerian experience point to three structural problems that are not unique to Lagos. First, governance readiness gaps — most African startups, even well-funded ones, do not have the financial reporting standards, board structures, or audit trails that public market investors require. Second, valuation mismatches — the valuations that VC-backed founders carry into conversations are often built on global comparable transactions that local public market investors find difficult to underwrite. Third, IPO liquidity concerns — even if a startup lists, the fear that there will not be enough buyers to create a functional secondary market remains real.
The NSE's response to this is that Kenya's liquidity situation is different from Nigeria's. That may be true. But the governance and valuation challenges are not geography-specific. They are ecosystem-specific, and the Kenyan startup ecosystem shares many of the same structural characteristics as Nigeria's when it comes to IPO readiness.
The Actual Pipeline Question
Perhaps the most fundamental question is the simplest one: which Kenyan startups would actually list on this board?
The venture-backed companies that have raised the most capital in Kenya — Twiga Foods, Wasoko, Lipa Later, the Wave-era fintechs — have raised primarily from international VCs whose preferred exit routes are trade sales or listings on offshore markets like the London Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, not the NSE. Their cap tables are structured for global liquidity events, not domestic ones.
The companies that might be genuinely interested in an NSE tech listing are those that are too locally focused or too early-stage to attract offshore interest — but these are also the companies that face the steepest governance and audit readiness gaps.
This is not an argument that the NSE's plan is impossible. It is an argument that the plan requires a clearer answer to a specific question: who is the first listing going to be, and what does their readiness look like today?
Ibuka never answered that question convincingly, which is part of why it stalled. A tech board that launches without a credible anchor listing in the pipeline will face the same outcome.
Why It Still Matters
None of this means the NSE is wrong to try. The gap between Kenya's startup ecosystem and its public markets is real, consequential, and overdue for a fix.
African investors who want exposure to the continent's tech growth currently have no good option on local exchanges. They are either buying Safaricom — which is a telco that happens to operate a fintech — or they are sitting on the sidelines. A functioning tech board with credible listings would change that, and it would deepen the capital available to Kenyan founders in ways that benefit the entire ecosystem.
The Ziidi Trader angle is also worth taking seriously. Kenya now has a growing population of retail investors who are digitally native, comfortable with risk, and actively looking for growth-oriented assets. That is a constituency that did not exist at scale when Ibuka launched in 2018. A well-marketed tech board listing could find genuine retail demand.
But optimism without scepticism is not analysis. The NSE has a track record of ambitious programmes that have underdelivered. The Nigerian Exchange has a dedicated tech board sitting empty. The structural challenges — governance gaps, valuation mismatches, exit route preferences — are real and have not been publicly addressed in the announcement made at ATS.
The tech board is the right idea. Whether the NSE has a credible plan to execute it is the question that remains unanswered.
What would it take for you to invest in a Kenyan startup listed on the NSE? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
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