James Mworia is a Kenyan lawyer, accountant and investment executive appointed founding chief executive officer of the National Infrastructure Fund on 7 September 2026. The move ended his nearly 18-year tenure as group CEO and managing director of Centum Investment Company. At the new state corporation, Mworia is responsible for building an institution intended to draw long-term private capital into major Kenyan infrastructure projects.

From Centum to Kenya's infrastructure fund

The National Infrastructure Fund Board announced Mworia's appointment after what it described as a competitive recruitment process. His term took effect on 7 September 2026, two months after Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi appointed him to the fund's board.

Centum separately confirmed the transition in a formal shareholder announcement. The company named Thomas Omondi-Achola, its group chief operating officer and partner for portfolio operations, as acting group CEO. Mworia's exit therefore represents both a change in his career and a major leadership handover at one of East Africa's best-known listed investment companies.

The fund gives him a different kind of mandate. A Kenyan parliamentary text setting out the NIF framework describes an institution designed to accelerate infrastructure, attract private and non-traditional finance, reduce reliance on public debt for commercially viable projects and strengthen national capacity to structure complex investments.

The sectors identified for attention include transport, energy, water, information technology and agricultural infrastructure. Mworia's immediate test will be turning those broad public ambitions into investable projects with credible governance and risk controls. That challenge sits within the regional debt and financing pressures examined in XTRAfrica's overview of East African budgets in 2026.

The filing clerk who became chief executive

Mworia's rise at Centum has become a widely cited Kenyan corporate story. In a first-person account of his investment career, he said he joined the company in 2001 as a filing clerk while holding a law degree and accounting qualifications. He became chief investment officer in 2005, left in December 2006 to work as head of investments at TransCentury, and returned as Centum's CEO in 2008.

His long tenure covered investments in real estate, financial services, education, energy, agribusiness and other sectors. Centum said in its transition notice that total assets rose from KSh4 billion in December 2008 to about KSh46 billion, while group debt was reduced by KSh20 billion. Those figures are the company's account of his record; they are relevant to the board's decision but should be read as corporate disclosures rather than independent measures of every investment outcome.