Betty Karimi

Betty Karimi has spent over two decades solving one of Kenya's toughest MSME problems: access to capital and access to markets.

As Founder and Managing Director of Recolte Limited, she built a trade finance and procurement solutions company that gives MSMEs practical tools to survive and scale, including LPO financing, invoice discounting, contract financing, performance bonds, bid bonds, and advance payment guarantees. These are the exact gaps that stall small businesses waiting on government and corporate payments, especially in a market where pending bills run into hundreds of billions of shillings.

Betty is also the visionary behind the SHEconomy movement, an annual event that brings together women entrepreneurs, financiers, and institutional partners to connect women owned MSMEs to AGPO opportunities, the 30% public procurement reservation for women, youth, and PWDs, and then to the financing needed to fulfil those contracts once won. It's a full circle model: SHEconomy builds the pipeline, Recolte funds it.

Betty was recognised as Woman CEO of the Year at the COYA Awards, but her greatest impact is structural.She built a replicable model connecting market access to capital access for thousands of MSMEs behind her.