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Speech by His Excellency President William Samoei Ruto, Phd., C.G.H on Madaraka Day June 1, 2025
Get PDFPresident William Ruto’s 2025 Madaraka Day speech celebrates Kenya’s progress 62 years after attaining internal self-rule, emphasising self-belief, national renewal, and transformative development driven by the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA). He highlights strong economic gains—including 5% average growth, reduced inflation, a stronger shilling, and expanded foreign reserves—alongside major achievements in affordable housing, universal healthcare (SHA), agriculture, education reforms, MSME financing, youth empowerment, and infrastructure. The President underscores the transformative impact of housing and healthcare programmes on ordinary citizens, notes significant strides in teacher recruitment, TVET expansion, and food production, and unveils ambitious Blue Economy investments aimed at unlocking Kenya’s maritime potential. He calls on Kenyans to embrace change, sustain momentum, and uphold the spirit of Madaraka by building a nation of equal opportunity, dignity, and shared prosperity
Kisii County Fiscal Strategy Paper 2025
No full texthe development of the County Fiscal Strategy Paper (CFSP) is one of the key stages in the budget preparation cycle. It sets out the county policy goals and strategic priorities that will form the basis for county’s budget formulation for the Financial Year 2025/2026 and the Medium-Term projections. This is an annual planning document that shows the various fiscal strategies that the County Government will employ to meet its overall objective of improved livelihoods for the citizens.
The County priorities and goals outlined in this CFSP are drawn from the County Integrated Development Plan (CIDP 2023-2027) and the FY 2025/2026 Annual Development Plan (ADP) with emphasis on investment in: wealth creation, Social Development, Environmental conservation, ICT and Infrastructure and Governance and devolution. These priorities form key linkage between the county planning policies and the budget process and form the basis for the formulation of 2025/2026 FY budget estimate. In compliance with the mandate bestowed on the County governments by the Constitution, Kisii County Government is dedicated to prudently utilize the available resources and enhancing fiscal discipline so as improve the living standards of its citizens. The County Government will work on the improved macro-economic environment to overcome development and fiscal challenges and the various interrelationship challenges within the national and county governance structures. The County Government will promote value addition, investment on infrastructure and support especially the small and medium enterprises so as to expand employment opportunities. Over the years, we have learned the need to lay a firm financial base for the County Government through the minimization of debt and maximization of revenues. We intend to achieve this with the CFSP (2025/2026) and the budget estimates to be drawn from the strategy paper
Gender effects of government credit programmes on entrepreneurship in Kenya: a propensity score matching approach
No full texturpose – This study investigates the role of government-supplied credit in addressing gender gaps in entrepreneurship in Kenya – a critical issue given the state’s influence in shaping entrepreneurial ecosystems, especially in contexts of deep structural inequality. Despite the proliferation of such credit programs, their effectiveness in closing financing and entrepreneurial gender gaps remains underexplored. It also remains unclear whether these initiatives foster transformative, opportunity-driven ventures or unintentionally reinforce necessity entrepreneurship, thereby perpetuating precarity and informality. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses an approach based on propensity score matching with the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) 2016 survey data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS).Findings – Government credit did not significantly affect opportunity-driven entrepreneurship but negatively impacted necessity entrepreneurship. It strongly supported employment growth, particularly in male-owned businesses. Gender analysis showed that men benefitted more, with their businesses shifting from necessity to opportunity entrepreneurship and seeing job growth. In contrast, women-owned businesses showed no significant entrepreneurial gains from the same credit access.Practical implications – Government credit promotes employment and lessens the need for necessity entrepreneurship, but its long-term effects on high-growth ventures are minimal. Evaluations should focus on outcomes like firm survival, productivity and competitiveness. Tailored support for women, addressing structural barriers and integrating mentorship and market access are crucial. A more strategic, inclusive and impact-driven approach is required for lasting success.Originality/value – This study challenges the assumption that government credit is inherently empowering, examining its role in promoting opportunity versus necessity entrepreneurship among women and contributing to broader debates on the state’s role in unequal entrepreneurial ecosystems
Compton photons at the GeV scale from self-aligned collisions with a plasma mirror
No full textInternational audienceWith today's multi-petawatt lasers, testing quantum electrodynamics (QED) in the strong field regime, where the electric field exceeds the Schwinger critical field in the rest frame of an electron, becomes within reach. Inverse Compton scattering of an intense laser pulse off a high-energy electron beam is the mainstream approach, resulting in the emission of high-energy photons that can decay into Breit-Wheeler electron-positron pairs. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that very high energy photons can be generated in a self-aligned single-laser Compton scattering setup, combining a laser-plasma accelerator and a plasma mirror. Reaching up to the GeV scale, photon emission via nonlinear Compton scattering exhibits a nonclassical scaling in the experiment that is consistent with electric fields reaching up to a fraction of the Schwinger field in the electron rest frame. These foolproof collisions guaranteed by automatic laser-electron overlap provide a new approach for precise investigations of strong-field QED processes
Decoding rank metric Reed-Muller codes
No full textInternational audienceIn this article, we investigate the decoding of the rank metric Reed--Muller codes introduced by Augot, Couvreur, Lavauzelle and Neri in 2021. We propose a polynomial time algorithm that rests on the structure of Dickson matrices, works on any such code and corrects up to half the minimum distance
MANDATORY INTEGRATION AGREEMENTS FOR UNEMPLOYED JOB SEEKERS: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED FIELD EXPERIMENT IN GERMANY
No full textInternational audienceIntegration agreements (IAs) are contracts between the employment agency and the unemployed, nudging the latter to comply with rules on search behavior. We designed and implemented a randomized controlled trial involving thousands of newly unemployed workers, randomizing at the individual level both the timing of the IA and whether it is announced in advance. Administrative records provide outcomes. Novel theoretical and methodological insights provide tools to detect anticipation and suggest estimation by individual baseline employability. The positive effect on entering employment is driven by individuals with adverse prospects. For them, early IA increase reemployment within a year from 53% to 61%
Polynomial approximations in a generalized Nyman–Beurling criterion
No full text12 pagesInternational audienceThe Nyman-Beurling criterion, equivalent to the Riemann hypothesis, is an approximation problem in the space of square integrable functions on , involving dilations of the fractional part function by factors , . Randomizing the generates new structures and criteria. One of them is a sufficient condition that splits into (i) showing that the indicator function can be approximated by convolution with the fractional part, (ii) a control on the coefficients of the approximation. This self-contained paper aims at identifying functions for which (i) holds unconditionally, by means of polynomial approximations. This yields in passing a short probabilistic proof of a known consequence of Wiener's Tauberian theorem. In order to tackle (ii) in the future, we give some expressions of the scalar products. New and remarkable structures arise for the Gram matrix, in particular moment matrices for a suitable weight that may be the squared -function for instance
Signed Barcodes for Multi-parameter Persistence via Rank Decompositions and Rank-Exact Resolutions
No full textInternational audienceAbstract In this paper, we introduce the signed barcode, a new visual representation of the global structure of the rank invariant of a multi-parameter persistence module or, more generally, of a poset representation. Like its unsigned counterpart in one-parameter persistence, the signed barcode decomposes the rank invariant as a -linear combination of rank invariants of indicator modules supported on segments in the poset. We develop the theory behind these decompositions, both for the usual rank invariant and for its generalizations, showing under what conditions they exist and are unique. We also show that, like its unsigned counterpart, the signed barcode reflects in part the algebraic structure of the module: specifically, it derives from the terms in the minimal rank-exact resolution of the module, i.e., its minimal projective resolution relative to the class of short exact sequences on which the rank invariant is additive. To complete the picture, we show some experimental results that illustrate the contribution of the signed barcode in the exploration of multi-parameter persistence modules
Double DVCS amplitudes including kinematic twist-3 and 4 corrections
No full text5 pages, 2 figures, conference proceedings for the 31st International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS2024)International audienceGeneralized parton distributions (GPDs) are off-forward matrix elements of quark and gluon operators that work as a window to the total angular momentum of partons and their transverse imaging (nucleon tomography). To access GPDs one needs to look into exclusive processes which are usually studied in a kinematic regime known as the Bj\"orken limit. In this limit, the photon virtualities are much larger than the hadron mass , and the kick to the hadron measured by the Mandelstam's variable . It turns out that this is not enough for the purposes of a precise GPD extraction and, in particular, of nucleon tomography for which measurements in a sizable range of are required. Deviation with respect to the Bj\"orken limit induces kinematic higher-twist corrections which enter the amplitudes with powers of and , where denotes the scale of the process (basically, the sum of photon virtualities in the case of DDVCS). There are also corrections by the name of "genuine" higher twists which are a separate topic and are not the subject of this research study. In this manuscript, we present novel calculations of DDVCS amplitudes off a (pseudo-)scalar target including up to kinematic twist-4 corrections. These results are important for measuring DDVCS, DVCS and TCS through the Sullivan process and off helium-4 target at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) and JLab experiments. Preliminary numerical estimates for the pion target are provided