Kenya Power has appointed Vivienne Yeda as the new Chairperson of the company’s Board of Directors effective November 13 2020.
Vivienne Yeda, Kenya Power’s First female board chair will take the helm from Mahboub Maakim, the outgoing Chairperson. Speaking on the appointment, the immediate outgoing Chairperson expressed his confidence in the new board t steer the company to growth and sustainability.
Vivienne Yeda doubles as the Director-General, East African Development Bank. She holds a Masters of Business from Edith Cowan University and a Master in International Finance from the University College London. She also served as a non-executive director in Kenya Power since July 2020.
Her tenure as chair comes at a time when the company is struggling with losses and mounting debt. Its debt for the period up to June 2020 hit Ksh 47.85 billion.
The company’s unaudited results for the period to June 2020 show a loss of Ksh 2.98 billion, its first loss in 17 years. The unaudited results are yet to be published. The company is also facing challenges in collecting from defaulters who owed up to Ksh 5.2 billion as of December 2019.
The state-owned power distributor is banking on a 20% hike in a pending tariff review to increase revenues to cushion the company from drops in demand, supplier defaults, and cover the cost of its capital intensive projects.
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