Stephen Mills

Stephen Mills came to Kenya from Khartoum, Sudan in the early eighties and never left.

Because of his exceptional contribution to highlighting pioneering history in East Africa, Steve Mills has proved to be one of Kenya’s well known literary ‘ambassadors’. An extensive and tireless traveller and propagator of Kenya’s culture and national attributes and strengths, he has show-cased the country’s history on many occasions with indelible impact. Indeed, his acclaimed book ‘Nairobi, Then & Now’, was used by the British Government as one of its contributions to the Republic of Kenya 50th Year Independence Celebrations in 2013.

Following a career in the Royal Air Force, and a brief stint as a professional footballer, he flew operations as a commercial helicopter pilot that took him from supporting oil well drilling platforms in the frozen Canadian north, to chemical-vector control flight operations in Equatorial West Africa to control the fly that caused river-blindness.

He also conducted helicopter-borne geophysical surveys in North Africa, off-shore oil operations in Nigeria, seismic operations in Madagascar, aerial photography in Guatemala, surveyed power lines over the mountains of Papua New Guinea and transported medical teams employed in eradicating smallpox in Ethiopia. His twenty-year career in aviation culminated in the establishment of his own airline company which pioneered donor-funded, scheduled-service humanitarian flight operations into East and Central Africa.

In the 1990s, the author founded CRBAfrica, sub-Saharan Africa’s first private credit bureau with the aim to increase access to credit whilst supporting responsible lending in 7 countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana, Mozambique, Ghana); the overwhelming success of which has positively contributed to financial inclusion of over 100 million citizens and better enabled monitoring of systemic risks by strengthening banking supervision.

Today he pursues various business interests across Africa and Asia.