The Kenyan government is in the process of opening 5 Consulates across the United States of America that will serve the Kenyan Diaspora. The 5 consulates will facilitate voting in upcoming 2017 elections as well as bring the services to the Kenyans in the diaspora closer and accessible.
The consulates will be in Boston, Minneapolis, Dallas, Chicago and Seattle. This was announced in a Kenyan Diaspora meeting in Los Angeles by Foreign Affairs and international Trade Cabinet Secretary, Amb Amina Mohamed.
The Kenyans living abroad are very important to Kenya especially economically seeing as the remit at least 1.5 billion US dollars last year alone. The Kenya Diaspora in the US is the largest and contributed about 50% of the total remittances to Kenya.
Other than the money in inject into our economy, they have very valuable skills and contacts that are very fundamental to the national development of the country as a whole.
Amb Amina also promised the business fraternity, “We are developing an incentive framework on remittances which includes lowering the costs of Diaspora transactions as well as aggregate Diaspora remittances. We are also exploring possibilities of preferential duty waivers and other concessions for Diaspora businesses.”
Kenya Ambassador to the United Stated, Njeru Githae urged the Kenyan in the US to take advantage of the Mission there as it could prove very fundamental especially in lobbying for the Kenyans to get international jobs and other opportunities.
The Kenyan Diaspora also raised the issues they were experiencing as they returned home more especially the engineers and lawyers. The requested the government put up a framework thatwill help the returnees ease smoothly into the system without necessarily being given a hard time by the respective bodies.
