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Narendra Raval's Devki Group has started building a cement factory in Kitui County costing 50 billion shillings, about $386 million, the company said on Friday, Sept. 25.
The plant is going up at Ngaaie in Mwingi North, an area holding large limestone deposits, and it will be the first cement factory in the county. Raval, who chairs the group, said it should begin operating in the middle of next year.
Hundreds of jobs are the argument he made for it. Thousands of local residents are already working on construction or supplying the site, he said, and the plant will add direct and indirect employment once it runs, along with work for transporters, suppliers and traders around it.
He framed that in generational terms. People talk about Generation Z, Raval said, but putting young people into jobs is the only route, and those jobs will not appear without industrialisation.
He also expects it to bring prices down, by producing cement closer to the market it serves rather than trucking it across the country.
Raval dismissed the objection that will follow. Some people had talked about monopoly, he said, and his answer was to create the monopoly for Kenyans rather than hand it to somebody else.
Devki is committing money to the community around the site as well. The company has pledged to build modern classrooms and an administration block at a local school, connect it to a reliable water supply, and start a feeding programme it intends to extend to neighbouring schools.
Kitui has been trying to turn its mineral deposits into industry for years, and the factory is the largest private investment the county has attracted.
Raval arrived in Kenya from India in 1981 at 19, working in a hardware shop in Nairobi before starting his own business. He built Devki Group from a small steel operation into one of East Africa's largest industrial companies, spanning cement, steel, roofing sheets and aluminium through brands including National Cement, Simba Cement and Maisha Mabati, with operations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He said the ultimate aim is to improve people's lives and make the plant a catalyst for growth across the region.
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