According to fDi Markets, a greenfield investment monitor, Asia-Pacific is en route to overtake western Europe as Kenya’s leading investor. Traditionally, western European countries such as the UK and Germany have been the countries’s key source of FDI, with 15 and eight projects each respectively. Asian countries, such as India, which has a total of 21 FDI projects into Kenya, are now catching up and overtaking their European counterparts. 

fDi Markets still reports that the majority of projects have come from western Europe, with Asia-Pacific a close second, but so far in 2011, both regions have made 11 investments into Kenya. Asia-Pacific is leading the way in terms of capital expenditure, having invested $4.52bn compared to the Middle East and western Europe, which invested $2.06bn and $1.87bn respectively, from January 2003 to July 2011. 

This shift may be a result of the deliberate effort to pursue economic diplomacy by the Kenyan president's administration. President Kibaki has deliberately worked with the Asia-Pacific in an economic capacity, more intensively than he has with traditional western markets. Since coming to power in 2003, Kibaki has visited the emerging market countries that rank top in the list of FDI source markets but has not travelled to any of the industrialised economies that topped the list in the past, except for the US.