This August, in addition to resort tourists and those on all-inclusive packages arriving on Neos charter flights to Mombasa and staying in Watamu or Diani, independent travelers staying in private accommodation or bed and breakfasts, and the usual suspects who return to the Kenyan coast every year, there will also be fellow Italians who have come “to explore.”

Obviously, they are not here for scientific or anthropological research, environmental or climate change studies, or to write scripts for nature documentaries or Netflix series.
These Italians are arriving in Kenya with a clear (or perhaps somewhat vague) idea of investing in the tourism sector or in a field where holiday-related development can generate profits.

August, especially for those setting up accommodation facilities or preparing rental properties, for example, can be an excellent testing ground to prepare for the real tourist season, the European winter and equatorial summer, which starts around November.
This is also true for other activities, which are the most popular among Italians, such as catering and entertainment. Between Watamu, Malindi, Kilifi, and Diani, properties owned or managed by fellow Italians are opening up again this year, although often not everything is done according to local practices and rules.
Even during an extremely positive season such as the one just ended, with the boom in Watamu and Kilifi in particular and the recovery of Malindi, which had been in decline for years, there have been cases of fake or unlicensed businesses, with local figureheads or foreigners at the forefront but without work permits. Unfortunately, these bad habits are not only the result of the attitude of certain Italians abroad, but also of the bad example set by fellow countrymen who have been running a precarious system based on corruption and expedients for years.
Some of them are the very people who, after leading new investors down rough roads and to the edge of legality, take advantage of them and may even be in cahoots with those who cheat them.

However, none of them will ever talk about their past misfortunes, the risks to their businesses, and those related to the law. All this while the government continues its work of registering all businesses in its online registers and, on this basis, will carry out on-site investigations to find those who act irregularly and do not pay permits, licenses, and taxes.
This has already happened in recent seasons with those who have bought villas or apartments and rented them out on platforms such as Airbnb and Booking without registering them with the Tourism Regulatory Authority (TRA) and without licenses or other bureaucratic requirements.
Many of these situations, especially in Watamu, have been fined and had to be brought into line.
This year, the government has promised a further crackdown on work permits and licenses, leaving those who have been following their own parallel path of illegality for years to their own devices (only to then complain about the rampant corruption in the country that they themselves fuel, and so on...). We hope that this year's new investors, whom we welcome to Kenya and wish every success in their businesses, will get their affairs in order right away. They should consult our local institutions or reputable government offices such as Keninvest (in Mombasa or Nairobi), rather than improvised local intermediaries or fixers who speak our language.