K-Rep Fedha Services Limited (KFS), registered under the Companies Act as a Limited liability Company, was established by K-Rep development Agency (KDA) in 2005 as a specialist FSA Management Company to provide management services and oversight to the FSAs.
With the mission of K-Rep Fedha Services Limited (KFS) being financial inclusion and poverty eradication in the arid and semi- arid parts of the country at the time, the aim was delivery of support and oversight services to FSAs in order to assure sustainability hence similar ripple effect to the individual members of the FSAs. This was necessitated by the fact that no financial institutions deemed those places economically viable, yet the communities in the areas were languishing in poverty due to lack of financial access.
KFS in consultation with the governance committees employs and deploys managers to the FSAs who are charged with the day-to-day management of the FSA operations. Management capacity is spread across the network, with KFS head office providing technical backstopping. In addition to providing management services and oversight KFS has also been involved in outreach, promotion and establishment of additional FSAs.
FSD Kenya has supported KFS over the last eight years, focusing on testing the efficacy of the FSA model as a way of building sustainable rural financial inclusion. Financial Services Associations (FSAs) are rural membership based financial institutions offering localized financial services to their members through pooling together of the members funds together. The basic FSA model is similar in many respects to other types of decentralised financial institutions; however, the common bond of the members is their physical location and that the members get interest rebate at the end of the year out of any monies made from the provision of the financial services to their members.