Feature: Kenya's small scale traders hope to boost savings from fall of power bills

It is Friday morning and Hans Joseph is already having a busy day. He operates a tattoo studio along Kenyatta Avenue in Nakuru town, located 160 km northwest of the capital Nairobi.

On his right hand is a tattoo inking tool whizzing softly from its contact with the customer's skin. The sound mutes when he clicks off the switch connected to electricity since the power has been cut off.

Three other customers are sitting on a bench at the reception waiting for their turn to have their preferred tattoo inscribed.

And so as Joseph holds onto his tool, his focus is to serve his customers satisfactorily without any kind of distraction.

"The more the customers I have, the more the profits which are good for me," says Joseph. However, Joseph says the cost of his electricity bills has been high taking a deep pitch into his gross profits.

Despite the injection of the 140MW of the geothermal power into the national grid last year and another 140MW on Thursday, the young entrepreneur is yet to notice much difference in his bills.

Joseph parted with 26 U.S. dollars to clear his January bill which is only 1.1 dollars less of the amount he used for the month of November.

"I have not seen any much of changes as I had expected but I hope that the cost would drop as promised by the president. It would be great for the businesses," Joseph told Xinhua in an interview in Nakuru.

Spending less on electricity increases amount set aside for savings to facilitate expansion and diversification of business as Joseph argued.

"I only look forward to that day I would be paying a monthly electricity bill of 11 dollars and I believe that is possible if we have more of cheap power in circulation," he said.

For Selina Ogolla who runs a salon within the Nakuru's business center, reducing the cost of electricity would greatly boost her savings.

"I spend up to 69 dollars just to cater for my electricity costs. This is too high and if cut by half or even more, I will save more to open another salon elsewhere," she said.

"Sometimes it feels like a punishment to use electricity but since there is no other choice of doing my business without it, I have to continue paying the huge bills," Ogolla said.

Her hopes are that the government finds an immediate way of reducing the cost of electricity to promote the small scale business environment.

Joseph and Ogollla are among the many Kenyans in the developing nation looking forward to seasons of lowered electricity costs.

Even though the business people say they have not recorded any significant change since the injection of the 140MW of geothermal power from Olkaria IV, Nakuru County, the government's assessment pins a different picture.

Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen), the state power generator indicates a reduction in the cost of electricity by 65 percent.

The fuel cost charge has dropped to 0.03 dollars per kWh in February from 0.08 dollars per kWh in August 2014 based on KenGen' s statistics.

On Thursday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta commissioned another 140MW from Olkaria I, a development the government projects to further depress the cost of power in the country.

Kenya is now among the countries in the world producing the highest volumes of geothermal power.

It is in the league of U.S., Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, Italy, New Zealand, Iceland, Japan and El Salvador.

Overtime, manufactures have cried foul of the high cost of doing business in the country due to unfavorable energy costs, a challenge exploitation of geothermal fossils is intended to address.

Kenya is among the countries in the African continent with a growing attraction for investments from the foreign investors.

The 2014 Ernst & Young's (EY's) Africa Attractiveness Survey identified the East African nation with South Africa in the southern region of the continent and Nigeria in West Africa as three counties most attractive destinations for investments in Africa.

These countries manifest common characteristics for economic developments including the rare minerals resources such as oil, gold and rare earth minerals; infrastructural development and a bulging consumer class.

In the last two years, resourceful minerals have been discovered in Kenya changing its tunes to a highly competitive zone for setting up businesses.

Oil deposits and gold have been located in the Rift Valley and Nyanza regions while the rare earth minerals and niobium have been found in the coastal region.

The government is already in the process of establishing an investment policy to provide a legal framework for taking advantage of the existing trade and commercial opportunities in the country. Endi