“Citizens in Kenya and across the world are not asking business to become a charity. They are asking it to be a committed partner: to hire from their communities, to invest in their futures, to communicate honestly in crisis, and to hold its leaders to the same standards of integrity that it demands from its suppliers and employees.”

A small coffee cooperative in the highlands of Kenya in the mid-1990s secured a European buyer willing to pay a premium for its beans. But that year, the rains failed and the harvest was barely a third of what was promised. The cooperative faced a choice: quietly blend in lower-grade beans to fulfil the contract, or send what it has, explain the situation, and absorb the loss. They chose transparency. Along with the smaller shipment, they sent a letter explaining the failed harvest, the quality of the beans, and their commitment to make good the shortfall in the next season. They lost money, but they demonstrated something more valuable: that when circumstances become difficult, they would rather tell the truth than protect themselves at the buyers expense.
Surprisingly, the buyer increased their order the following year despite the initial disappointment. Other roasters learning of the story, approached the same cooperative and saw it grow in leaps and bounds. Rather than build a brand, the cooperative built a track record of doing the right thing, even when doing so was costly. And that is where genuine trust begins: with an ‘advance payment’. The central argument of this story can be stated simply: trust is the invisible infrastructure on which all economic activity depends, and its absence is among the most expensive conditions a business can operate in.

The paradox of being trusted because others have failed Evidence from the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer and from the World Bank suggests that the private sector stands at a fork in the road. One path leads deeper into the paradox of default leadership in trust rankings — a position in which business is trusted not because it has earned it, but because every other institution has lost it. This is a precarious position. Trust built on the relative failures of others is trust without roots. It will not survive the first serious crisis of corporate integrity, and it offers no protection against the corruption contagion that spreads from weak public institutions into the private sector regardless of individual corporate conduct.

The other path requires a more demanding choice: to accept that the legitimacy of the private sector is inseparable from its genuine orientation toward the common good. This is not a counsel of commercial naivety. Economists from Amartya Sen to E.F. Schumacher insist on the disastrous consequences of frameworks that fail to synergise business and the public good. A business that pursues profit without regard for human dignity or social responsibility does not merely act unethically — it erodes the very conditions that make profitable enterprise possible.

Four practical pillars to rebuild trust in the Private Sector

What makes this idea significant is that the data clearly aligns with the ideal. But what does this actually look like in practice? It is characterized by four practical pillars: the return to human scale, the institutionalization of operational transparency, the prioritization of long-term reciprocity, and a mandate for ethical leadership. Starting with the human scale, the 2026 Edelman data shows that trust is highest in “my employer” (78%) and lowest in large, abstract institutions. Schumacher understood why: when enterprises grow beyond the scale at which personal responsibility is visible,
human relationships are replaced by anonymous rules, and no one feels accountable for anything. Businesses that structure themselves as federations of smaller, community-embedded units, where employees and customers are known by name and not account number, are not simply making a romantic gesture. They are making a structural choice in favour of trustworthiness.
Then, operational transparency. The cooperative in our story chose to disclose the bad news rather than “manage it”. Research confirms that when businesses allow stakeholders to see how decisions are made, e.g. by publishing their reasoning, honouring their commitments publicly, acknowledging their failures before being caught, the cost of doing business falls. Hence, suspicion is expensive, while transparency is not.

This deepens through long-term reciprocity. Kenyan citizens report that the most effective ways for a company to earn their trust are to hire from their community (66%) and invest in long-term community projects (60%). These actions go beyond philanthropic activities, and signal that a business intends to still be here in ten years. That signal, consistently sent and consistently honoured, is precisely what transforms a transaction into a relationship. Lastly, we cannot avoid the role of institutional leadership. Trust in companies is increasingly mediated through trust in the people who run them. A CEO who consults people with different values before making major decisions, who speaks honestly in crisis rather than through a communications team, and who holds themselves to the same standards they demand of their organization, is doing more than virtue signaling.
They are performing the most strategically important function in the business, which is to demonstrate at a public and at personal dimension, that the enterprise means what it says.

Citizens in Kenya and across the world are not asking business to become a charity. They are asking it to be a committed partner. These are not utopian demands. They are the minimum conditions for the kind of sustained public confidence that allows business to plan long-term, attract investment, navigate regulation, and contribute to the democratic societies on which market economies ultimately depend. Trust is always an advance payment, and the private sector has the resources, the reach, and the relative credibility to make that advance payment to the society it operates in. The question now is, will it?

Article by Dr. Jotham Njoroge