Nairobi, May 14 -- For a long time, the rules on how multinationals are taxed were written without Africa in the room. That is starting to change - and Kenya is right in the middle of it.

Take a familiar example. A multinational tech company earns significant revenue from Kenyan users. It has no office here. It pays no corporate tax here. The profits sit in a low-tax jurisdiction elsewhere, structured in a way that is fully compliant with the current rules. Those rules, however, were never really designed with markets like Kenya in mind. That is the system we have lived with.

The international tax framework - built on bilateral treaties, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development guidance and transfer pricing rules - was...