Mr. Charles N. KAHUTHU is the Regional Coordinator and CEO of the East African Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (EACCIA). Before then he was Deputy CEO of KNCCI and also coordinated the functions of Membership and Branch Network Development, as well as all external partnerships between the Chamber and other stakeholders, including development partners. He was particularly very involved in regional integration issues having contributed to the two key protocols that are guiding the integration process of East Africa, namely; the Customs Union Protocol and the Common Market Protocol.
Mr Kahuthu is a Private Sector Development Specialist, as well as public-private sector partnerships building specialist, providing a wide range of business management and socio-economic development consultancy services to Governments, private sector institutions, development agencies and non-governmental organizations, among others.
He is an experienced policy analyst and has been a member of many task forces facilitating the review of public policy in recent years. He has carried out very many consulting assignments in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Africa, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Latin America and France. He is extremely conversant with the planning, preparation and implementation of development programmes and projects.
Mr. Kahuthu has gained a lot of experience in the negotiations for private, public and social development projects financing, with local and international financial institutions, including the World Bank Group, the European Union, the African Development Bank and all the United Nations Agencies. He has also interacted extremely well with many donor nations, such as France, Belgium, Italy, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Britain, a number of Latin American countries, and the United States of America, and is quite conversant with their bilateral cooperation strategies in support of development countries.
Up to December 2008, Mr. Kahuthu was employed by the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) as Sector Coordinator for Agriculture and Rural Development, coordinating all the partnership engagements with Government Ministry clusters that constitute the Agricultural and Rural Development Sector. Prior to this assignment, he acted as the African Region Coordinator for Latin American Economic System (SELA) for two years and before that assignment, he was the Enterprise Development Adviser for the Department of Micro and Small Enterprises Development, in the Ministry of Labour and Human Resource Development. In his role as Enterprise Development Adviser, he provided the required technical support to the Head of the Department, who coordinated the activities of a number of Donor Programmes, including assisting both the Ministry’s staff and contracted implementing agencies in preparing their work plans and other forms of technical assistance, such as project proposal writing, carrying out project monitoring and evaluation activities, among others. He also promoted networking amongst the implementing agencies and other programmes and projects that the Ministry was implementing, and also carried out resource mobilization assignments to fund the various SMEs Programme activities.
He has been on a panel of the list of Consultants that the Ministries of Trade; Industrialization; Agriculture; as well Youth and Sports, and can be called upon to undertake various studies, on their behalf, with special emphasis in Trade and Industrial Development Policy, Region Integration, Youth Development Programmes, as well as Small Enterprise Development. He acted as the Secretary to the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Economic and Development Committee, with special responsibility for issues relating to EAC, NEPAD and ACP-EU Economic and Development Cooperation, through the Economic Partnerships Agreements (EPAs), and also the KNCCI’s Focal Point with the Government in the implementation of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
Mr. Kahuthu is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland, where he obtained a Bachelor of Commerce degree (Business Administration Option), with emphasis in international marketing and economics. He has been undertaking an MBA Degree Programme, “on-line”, as an external student, with the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences of the University of the Free State (UOFS), in South Africa, a programme that has been developed by UOFS, in collaboration with the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at De Paul University, Chicago, USA.
Mr. Kahuthu is a member of the EACCIA Steering Committee.
