Drs. Menghis Bairu (CEO, Co-Founder) and Richard Chin (Co-Founder and Board Chair) of greenfield startup Bio Usawa (San Francisco, USA and Kigali, Rwanda) were recently invited to tour one of Kenya’s premier projects – the Naivasha Special Economic Zone (SEZ). The SEZ, composed of several sub-zones, is located in Nakuru County along the Nairobi-Naivasha Standard Gauge Railway line at Mai Mahiu.

The SEZ has been identified as one of the flagship projects under the Economic Pillar of the Kenya Vision 2030 that includes Science and Technology Park, designed to help science, technology and innovation flourish both locally and in the East Africa region. Kenya’s ultimate vision is to create a state-of-the-art ecosystem that is “conducive to investment, innovation, and sustainable growth”, which is also a key element of Bio Usawa’s plan for building local biomanufacturing capacity in Africa.

In this regard, the array of stacked shipping containers drew our attention as a fresh approach to building sustainable, eco-friendly spaces for research, development, manufacturing and testing of high-value biomedicines for Kenya and beyond.