Four million Kenyans to be removed from the CRB after Ruto’s directive
2 min readFour million Kenyans who had defaulted loans to be removed from the CRB list after President Ruto’s directive.
Under proposals made by President William Ruto to restructure the nation’s credit sector, more than four million loan defaulters will be struck from blacklists maintained by the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB).
The President has instructed the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to stop placing borrowers on a blacklist and adopt a scoring system where defaulters receive a poor mark as opposed to being excluded from the financial system.
The government, according to President Ruto, supports the credit-sharing mechanism but wants a system that allows borrowers to be ranked in order of best to worst, allowing lenders to correctly price their loans based on risk.
“I am very happy that between four and five million Kenyans will by the beginning of November be out of blacklisting,” the President said on Wednesday.
“That is very important because they have been excluded from any formal borrowing because of black listing and have been left at the mercy of shylocks and predatory lenders that exploit them and many Kenyan pay as much as 1000 percent.”
This is the second time the government is removing defaulters from CRB listing after mobile digital lenders were barred from blacklisting borrowers who default on loans of less than Sh1,000.
The majority of the 4.6 million borrowers blacklisted at the time were those who had defaulted on digital loans of less than Sh1,000, according to data from the nation’s three CRBs.
The new administration is taking a page out of the playbook of departed President Uhuru Kenyatta, who last year halted listing defaulters on loans of less than Sh5 million as a step to soften borrowers heavily struck by Covid-19 economic shocks.
During campaigns, Ruto and his brigade went around the country collecting opinions and Kenyans said blacklisting at CRBs was one of the major concerns, alongside the cost of digital loans.
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