With an economy battered by coronavirus, locust invasion and floods, Kenya’s Finance Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yatani on June 11 tabled a Ksh2.79 trillion ($27.9 billion) budget for the 2020/2021 fiscal year that seeks to revive almost every sector of the economy as quickly as possible and still keep the government running.

This year’s budget comes against a backdrop of weakening global economy, shrinking domestic revenue collections and a surge in public expenditures to address targeted interventions designed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic whose level of infections in the country has surpassed the 3,000 mark.

The government has revised the country’s growth prospects for 2020 to as low as 2.5 per cent from 6.1 per cent compared with last year’s growth of 5.4 per cent.

“Going forward the government will scale up efforts to boost the tourism sector by promoting aggressive post Covid-19 tourism marketing and providing support for hotel refurbishment through soft loans to be channelled through the Tourism Finance Corporation,” said Mr Yatani.

Mr Yatani said the government is also working on the post-Covid-19 Economic Recovery Plan, which among other things will focus on adequate local and foreign resource mobilisation to ensure sustainable funding of development programmes.